8

I just made vanilla ice cream with my ice cream machine. The taste was amazing, however, the texture was sandy and gritty. I made a awful lot, and I do not want to dump the ice cream. How am I going to make it creamy, or use the ice cream for something else?

Alexandrang
  • 183
  • 1
  • 4
  • what recipe did you use? – Luciano Nov 09 '20 at 10:14
  • 1
    I'd like to remind people that this question isn't about how to make ice cream having less crystals from scratch - this would have been closed as a duplicate. It is about what to do about the existing batch of already-crystalized ice cream. – rumtscho Nov 09 '20 at 10:48
  • 1
    @Luciano, I used this recipe. https://barefeetinthekitchen.com/homemade-ice-cream-recipe/ However, I made my own heavy whipping cream with butter and milk. – Alexandrang Nov 09 '20 at 13:54
  • 1
    If you can't recover the ice cream using the process that bob1 recommended, you might be able to confuse people by adding something crunchy into the ice cream. One of my mom's friends would make a sort of pie-like dish that was sweetened wheat chex, a layer of softened ice cream, and then more chex on top, and then re-freeze it. – Joe Nov 09 '20 at 14:32
  • 2
    @Alexandrang "made my own heavy whipping cream with butter and milk" - you didn't make whipping cream, you made a mixture of butter and milk. It doesn't behave like whipping cream, and it is likely one of the main causes of your grittiness. – rumtscho Nov 09 '20 at 14:53
  • @Joe given that the question is for using up or repurposing the current batch of ice cream, I would say this is an answer, not a comment. – rumtscho Nov 09 '20 at 14:54
  • @rumtscho : Only if you assume that it was just a matter of mixing them together. (like you did in https://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/34341/67 ) There *are* devices that are specifically for this purpose : https://thevintagekitchenstore.co.uk/en/butter-cream-making/45-cr.html , and we have no idea if one was used. – Joe Nov 09 '20 at 15:19
  • @Joe Very interesting find. I am still skeptical though - while you can certainly agitate cream and butter together, I doubt that you will ever get the same size and distribution of fat globules as in actual heavy cream. I found a couple of blog posts documenting modern-day experience with it, and they only mention making items which use the cream in a heated mixture (pie filling, pudding). Even if equipped with such a device, I wouldn't trust it to produce something that has the same microstructure as actual cream. – rumtscho Nov 09 '20 at 16:26
  • @rumtscho : I have no experience with them, so I have no idea how well they work. I just know that they exist. My understanding is that it has very small nozzles that the melted butter is forced through under pressure to create smaller droplets than you would get by simply trying to stir the two together. – Joe Nov 09 '20 at 16:47
  • @Joe, yep, that's exactly what happened, lol. The milk and the butter would often separate even after I vigorously whisked it. It was yellow at the top, white at the bottom. I decided to ignore it, since it didn't really affect the taste of it. I guess that's why my ice cream became gritty. – Alexandrang Nov 09 '20 at 21:20
  • Perhaps adding a little amount of honey might help. – Snack Exchange Nov 10 '20 at 17:08
  • @aminabzz, why honey? Have you tried this method before? – Alexandrang Nov 10 '20 at 21:08
  • @Alexandrang Honey makes your ice cream soft and more delicious. Scoop ice creams that you eat in a coffee shop have honey so that the ice cream remains soft in the freezer. – Snack Exchange Nov 10 '20 at 21:28
  • @Alexandrang I almost forgot. Also, you can add Salep to your ice cream. It has the same effect. Even it can make your ice cream more elastic and stretchy. – Snack Exchange Nov 10 '20 at 21:35
  • Oh, that makes sense. – Alexandrang Nov 10 '20 at 21:43
  • I would recommend salep more than honey. honey doesn't work sometimes for some ice creams. but you try both **separately** – Snack Exchange Nov 10 '20 at 21:57
  • Hmm, that's interesting. I might want to try that. If I have honey or salep. – Alexandrang Nov 11 '20 at 02:22

3 Answers3

5

Given all of the advice so far, and as you said that you started with a rather large batch, I might try a few things. I would recommend trying a small-ish portion at a time, so you don't ruin the whole batch:

  1. Soften the ice cream slightly, then put it through a food processor to see if you can make it less gritty, then re-freeze. (or possibly don't re-freeze, if it has a soft-serve like consistency)

  2. Soften the ice cream slightly, then mix in other ingredients to add texture to the ice cream to try to hide the grittiness. Nuts, cookie or pretzel bits, or anything else that's crunchy. You could also make an 'ice cream pie', but you'd want a rather thin layer of ice cream so it's not so obvious that it's not cream. (maybe something like this

  3. Scrape it with a fork, and tell people it's a granita. (or, actually make a fruit granita, and then serve it layered with granita / scraped ice cream / etc.)

  4. Melt it down, add starch and cook into a pudding, then re-freeze. (frozen pudding also has a strange texture that isn't quite ice-cream like).

  5. Melt it, add some more eggs, then use it as the custard for french toast or bread pudding.

Joe
  • 78,818
  • 17
  • 154
  • 448
3

The texture will be as a result of ice-crystal formation.

During ice cream manufacture you are basically cooling a mix of cream and sugar and aiming to make an emulsion that reduces the ice-crystals into small enough bits that they feel smooth. Churning and cooling are the two things that allow this to happen. Churning mixes air and water into the cream (fat) creating tiny bubbles known as lipospheres that freeze solid without creating much in the way of ice.

Your grittiness is likely to be a direct consequence of making a large batch and the machine not being able to churn it properly for long enough or churning it incompletely, or perhaps as a result of it being difficult to chill to the right temperature quickly enough. Ice crystals will grow under any of these conditions.

You may be able to re-process it, basically soften (maybe melt) and split into smaller batches, then re-churn. as @Rumtscho has pointed out in his answer and comment you can't actually do this.

bob1
  • 12,979
  • 21
  • 49
  • I suspect that you'd want to melt it completely to ensure there are no seed crystals left in it. And to make sure that there's good distribution of the fat as there;s new information that this was made with "homemade cream" in there. (I'd melt it and run it through a blender, then follow standard procedures for freezing ice cream). If you had a food processor, you might be able to get away with running softened ice cream through it, but that too might come out gritty. – Joe Nov 09 '20 at 14:28
  • 1
    Sadly, this doesn't work. When you churn for the first time, the churning process not only creates an ice cream texture, it actually already starts a buttering process (the fat globules start coalescing a bit), but it stops before you get actual butter. If you try churning a second time, it gets too much agitation and your base will butter out. This is not just theory, I have tried it myself several times and it never worked. (This is of course moot for the OP's batch because they started out with butter anyway, but our answers should apply to the general case). – rumtscho Nov 09 '20 at 15:03
  • @rumtscho - good to know. I have never made ice cream myself, just know the theory. I'll edit to correct. – bob1 Nov 09 '20 at 20:05
2

You are not going to make it creamy. Re-freezing will give you up worse crystals, even if you try to change something about your process.

If you don't want to eat it frozen, you have to thaw it and drink it as a milkshake, or use it as a sweet custard sauce.

rumtscho
  • 134,346
  • 44
  • 300
  • 545