The Perfect Scoop

Although you do generally need an ice cream maker in your kitchen, homemade ice cream is a great type of recipe to add to your repertoire and David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop is a great book to start with. The book covers all kinds of ice creams, sorbets, sherberts and granitas, as well as a variety of sauces and mix-ins to pair your creations with.

The book is laid out by category, beginning with an introduction that gives you the basics of ice cream making. Most ice creams start out the same way, and the instructions, tips and troubleshooting tips that are provided are very useful. All of the building blocks of great ice cream – as David reminds us in the intro to the book – are things that are readily available at all supermarkets, but you can put some extra time into hunting down the perfect raspberries at a farmer’s market or using a more exotic dark chocolate to take your ice cream up a step in flavor. After you have the basics down and have drooled over the lovely photos in the book, you’re ready to dive into the ice creams. Although you may have to do a little planning to get your ice cream maker set ahead of time, the recipes otherwise come together very easily and result in a very flavorful product. Once you start, there are hundreds of recipes in the book to choose from and hundreds more that you can put together yourself using the basic recipes from the book.

With this cookbook, you have a great advantage in that you can try some of the recipes before you buy the book if you’re unsure as to how you’ll like it. This is because the book has been very popular with food bloggers (in part because it’s a good cookbook and in part because David is a blogger himself) and if you poke around the internet you’ll find recipes like Pear-Caramel Ice Cream, Coffee Ice Cream and Chocolate Sorbet