Value Ice cream

[jefmcg]

Do you actually need a specific device for it though?

yes. Ice cream needs to be smooth and aerated. You can make a frozen desert with a home freezer, shallow tray and a fork (set the alarm and break the ice crystals every hour or so with the fork) but it will still contain large enough ice crystals too be gritty and crunchy and it won't have the airy quality of a well churned ice cream.

Granitas and sorbets can be made quite successfully without an ice cream maker, but to make a good ice cream, it needs to be continually churned while freezing.

Neapolitan ? You know the strawberry,choc and vanilla.Exotic when I was a kid

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmHZTQe1PV4

(it's in italian I think, but you get the picture)

they're just the same ice cream loaded down with more crap and extra sugar for a false sense of luxury.

um - no ... unless by crap you mean less of these ingredients

Reconstituted Whey Protein Concentrate (from Milk), Partially Reconstituted Whey Powder, Sugar, Palm Oil, Dextrose, Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Sodium Alginate), Flavouring, Colour (Beta-Carotenes)

and more of these
Ingredients:
Whole Milk, Double Cream (Milk) (34%), Demerara Sugar, Dried Skimmed Milk, Pasteurised Free Range Egg, Sugar, Madagascan Vanilla (0.8%) (Vanilla Extract, Ground Vanilla Pods)
(Tesco's finest, chosen at random)

They are completely different. I'm not sure what else could be done to make something "luxury" than this. The very best vanilla ice creams are made with a rich custard made with cream, chilled and then churned below freezing. The above list of ingredients suggests this is what they have done.

When I'm in charge of everything, fake ice cream will have to have very big labels and be dyed bright blue.

You will like Australia/New Zealand's law. You can't call a product ice cream, unless it is at least 10% dairy fat, i.e. 10% cream. The above product where the fat comes palm trees would have to call itself "Frozen dairy desert" or "Creamy vanilla" or some other weasel words. I can't find an actual example, as all the products in the online oz supermarkets do not use palm oil, and the only products that aren't labelled ice cream are frozen yoghurts and sorbets.

 

[winjim]

Granitas and sorbets can be made quite successfully without an ice cream maker, but to make a good ice cream, it needs to be continually churned while freezing.

Carefully, or it'll turn into butter.

(it's in italian I think, but you get the picture)

Is a proper Neapolitan not strawberry vanilla and pistachio to give the colours of the Italian flag? @Pat "5mph" might know...

 

[nickyboy]

So when you buy one of those soft 99s from the ice cream van what's in that "ice cream"?

I presume it's a tasty mix of sugar and fat cos it's flippin' delicious

 

[summerdays]

I thought this was going to be about childhood memories.... My grandparents lived on a farm without a freezer I'm sure, and occasionally on a nice day Granda would drive into town and come back with that oblong cardboard box with vanilla ice cream (occasionally raspberry ripple), and the blocks were cut off and put between two wafers. No idea what the brand was.

 

[vickster]

Walls used to make the blocks

 

[biggs682]

I thought this was going to be about childhood memories.... My grandparents lived on a farm without a freezer I'm sure, and occasionally on a nice day Granda would drive into town and come back with that oblong cardboard box with vanilla ice cream (occasionally raspberry ripple), and the blocks were cut off and put between two wafers. No idea what the brand was.

i remember those days as well

 

[Hitchington]

Recently I've got into buying a £1 Sainsbury's ice cream brick and packet of rectangle wafers and making old skool ice cream sandwiches like my old nan used to make me when I was little. OK the "ice cream" is not real gourmet ice cream and the wafers are cheap, but food is mostly about emotion and memory and when I eat one of these ice cream sandwiches I'm momentarily transported back to my nan and grandad's garden on a hot summers day circa 1976.

 

[smutchin]

So when you buy one of those soft 99s from the ice cream van what's in that "ice cream"?

Air, mostly. The machine more or less doubles the volume of the mixture.

 

[User169]

When I'm in charge of everything, fake ice cream will have to have very big labels and be dyed bright blue.

Smurf ice cream! My kids love it.

 

[smutchin]

um - no ... unless by crap you mean less of these ingredients

and more of these
Ingredients:
Whole Milk, Double Cream (Milk) (34%), Demerara Sugar, Dried Skimmed Milk, Pasteurised Free Range Egg, Sugar, Madagascan Vanilla (0.8%) (Vanilla Extract, Ground Vanilla Pods)
(Tesco's finest, chosen at random)

They are completely different. I'm not sure what else could be done to make something "luxury" than this.

Ok, fair enough! Making assumptions based on my experience of being disappointed by some 'Finest' products...

The very best vanilla ice creams are made with a rich custard made with cream, chilled and then churned below freezing. The above list of ingredients suggests this is what they have done.

Well, there's more to a recipe than the ingredients but I take your point.

 

[srw]

When I'm in charge of everything, fake ice cream will have to have very big labels and be dyed bright blue.

and it will still sell better than the artisanal stuff.

I have a real soft spot for Mr Whippy, even though (or because) I rarely had it as a child. It may have been invented by an evil milk-snatcher, and it may be a completely artificial industrial by-product of the oil industry, but it's an extremely well-crafted product. And at heart it's just whey, fat, sugar and flavouring - which is exactly what's in the finest hand-crafted small-batch organic free-range ice-cream anyone can imagine.

 

[Tin Pot]

and it will still sell better than the artisanal stuff.

I have a real soft spot for Mr Whippy, even though (or because) I rarely had it as a child. It may have been invented by an evil milk-snatcher, and it may be a completely artificial industrial by-product of the oil industry, but it's an extremely well-crafted product. And at heart it's just whey, fat, sugar and flavouring - which is exactly what's in the finest hand-crafted small-batch organic free-range ice-cream anyone can imagine.

Artisanal?

They need another hipster phrase stat.

 

[flake99please]

I'm partial to a '99' occasionally.

 

[Doseone]

A mate of mine used to work for an ice cream company in New Zealand. His job was sales to the Pacific Islands. Tough gig

He used to say it was all about the "over-run" which is their way of saying how much air is in the ice cream. Basically, the cheaper the product the more air was in it.

 

[jefmcg]

and it will still sell better than the artisanal stuff.

You might be right, but as I said up thread, Australia differentiates between ice cream and products with zero cream and the latter don't exist.

Though the British palate is not very refined - so maybe you are right.