Troubleshooting homemade ice cream August 15
Making homemade ice creams and frozen yogurts is fun, but even when you have a good quality ice cream maker, there can be some difficulties with the process. The top two concerns that people have are (1) the ice cream is too soft and (2) the ice cream is too hard.
Ice cream made in a machine designed for home use often doesn’t freeze ice cream to the consistency of store-bought ice cream, and while it is still scoopable right out of the machine, the fact that it is a bit softer can put some people off. My ice cream maker has a frozen “core” that chills the ice cream as it churns. It also becomes less cold the longer that the machine is on, so there is a point at which my ice cream mixture simply will not get any firmer. The reason for this lack of firmness compared to commercial ice cream largely has to do with the fact that commercial ice creams have spent lots of time in extremely cold freezers (even at the grocery store), while a fresh homemade ice cream has not. Almost all recipes will direct you to further chill your finished product to firm it up even more after it comes out of the ice cream maker.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the problem of homemade ice cream being too firm, especially after it has been stored in the freezer for a while. Some say that fat content will keep ice cream creamy and soft. This is true (especially when it comes to keeping the ice cream creamy) but one of the keys to a scoopable ice cream is actually the amount of air in the mixture. The more air that is distributed into the mix, the easier it will be to soften the ice cream and to scoop it. Home ice cream makers don’t work at the speed of commercial machines, and often less air gets incorporated into the mix overall. Adding a bit of vodka or other alcohol (as I did here) can lower the freezing point of the ice cream and help to keep it from hardening too much, but really the only way to beat this problem entirely is to have patience and thaw your ice cream for half an hour or so before indulging.
katy Aug 15
Ohhh, very helpful post. I did kind of wonder why my homemade fro yo needs to be hacked to pieces with a chisel to pry off enough for a small bowl after it’s been sitting in my freezer for a day or two. I thought it was the fat-content problem, but this makes much more sense!
kittymama Aug 16
My problem is not the hardness as much as the fact that if I churn my ice cream for 20 minutes, like the manual says, it always ends up grainy. I pull mine out somewhere between 12-16 minutes. But for many years, I just thought homemade ice cream was grainy. I never hear anyone else discuss this. Am I the only one or am I doing something wrong? I have tried several machines and many recipes. I don’t have a problem taking it out earlier, I just don’t understand why they tell us 20 mins when that’s too long in my opinion.
Nicole Aug 16
kittymama - I’m not sure what you mean by grainy, so I’ll assume that it is one of two things. (a) The sugar in your ice cream mixture is not fully dissolved before it goes into the mixer or (b) the graininess that you’re referring to is from ice crystals.
Far more ice crystals form in homemade ice cream than commercial because the at-home machines don’t freeze a mixture as quickly or efficiently as big commercial machines. This gives ice crystals more time to form and, yes, can contribute to a texture that is less than perfectly smooth. You’re right that churning for less time can help the problem. It doesn’t really matter what the manual says; churn your ice cream until it is as close to the consistency you like as you can get it, then enjoy!
Wla Aug 24
I had a problem with ice crystals, too. After doing some research, I learned that water in the ice cream mixture will separate after the ice cream has been mixed, then freeze to form crystals. Commercial ice cream makers use a quick “flash freeze” process to prevent this. So I tried placing the ice cream bucket in an ice chest with dry ice and regular ice to freeze the mixture quickly and found that this minimized the presence of ice crystals. I used a small amount of dry ice from Smart & Final.
Heidi Jan 6
Does it make a difference in the freezing process if you use snow or ice for freezing ? Ours never reached a mashed potatoe consistancy even after an hr of freesing
Diane George Apr 6
I had a problem with “grainy” ice cream also. I let the machine churn the ice cream for 30 minutes. I guess this is too long. Any other tips besides more cream will be useful.
Lisa S. Jul 3
I just made some ice cream for the first time and could use a little advice. The finished product tasted like frozen ice crystals and frozen butter. The ice cream wasn’t very sweet, but the main issue is the texture, could this be due to the over mixing mentioned earlier in this post? I was wondering if chilling the cooked custard overnight could have caused it to seperate? Any advice anyone?
Deborah Oct 7
My ice cream issue is similar to Lisa’s in that I seem to have tiny globules of butter in my ice cream. It tastes good and is plenty sweet, but there’s definitely something wrong with the fat. My (butternut squash ice cream) recipe called for 2 yolks, a cup of heavy cream, and 1/2 cup of milk. It felt like tiny chunks of butter and left a film of buttery ick in my mouth. I chilled the mix for a couple hours before churning. Anyone have any suggestions? Should I use a lighter cream or maybe half and half instead of cream? Thanks!
RobertY Oct 8
Deborah…I have made ice cream and have tried figuring out what the commercial ice cream makers do different compared to homemade ice cream.
I found out that Breyers actually mixes liquid nitrogen into their mix to aerate it and almost instantly cool it. This way they get around using preservatives and the butterfat gets dispersed evenly in the mix. Obviously liquid nitrogen is out of the question for us…
But I have seen that a lot of them use lecithin ( a soy based emulsifier you can buy by the quart in health food area of groceries) . They use this to suspend the butterfat in the mix without it separating out. It also preserves the fat longer in the mix by coating each particle and keeping oxygen from it.
Try adding at least a tablespoon of lecithin to your batch next time. You might need more (it has no taste) since you need more based on cream content. Work your way up on it (2-3 tbls) to find a good balance