Southerners use buttermilk more than people in other parts of the world. A long time ago I posted about making buttermilk pie, and people said, "What? Buttermilk? In a pie?" It's like custard pie, only with more zip.
Buttermilk ice cream is the same idea: it gives a little twist to a summertime standard. I was thinking about fun summer things we could do today and homemade ice cream seemed like an obvious choice.
The recipe is easy: 2 cups buttermilk, 2 cups whipping cream, 2 cups sugar (I like dark brown sugar better than white sugar, but white sugar is more traditional), 2 T. vanilla. Stir it until the sugar is dissolved. Pour into your ice cream maker and let 'er rip.
When I got to the let 'er rip stage, however, I was chagrined to discover ice water leaking from the bottom of my ice cream maker. A dim memory from late last summer resurfaced, a piece that rusted out. Since I bought the ice cream maker at the thrift store 7 years ago, I didn't shed bitter tears. I said, "All right, boys, we're cranking this batch ourselves."
The boys have been watching Mythbusters lately, courtesy of Amazon Prime, and they had a bunch of ideas about how we could get it going. ("It's too bad we don't have any servos," my 12-year-old mused.) We plugged the hole at the bottom with Play-Doh and added the water and salt. We tried a couple of options for connecting a lever to the dasher, including superglue and a plastic fork (FAIL), until we settled on a wrench and packing tape.
It was kind of a slog, but the result was really good ice cream.
I had it stashed in the freezer in a plastic container. Marty came in while I was doctoring a different plastic container, filled with the vichyssoise I planned to take on our dinner picnic tonight. It hadn't turned out very well initially, but I thought I'd improved it. He tasted it and said sadly, "It's so...potato-ey." I thought, "Yeah, well, it's POTATO SOUP, kid," but I said, "What do you think it needs?" He knew right away: "It needs to be sweeter." I said, "Sweeter?"
He thought I had been doctoring the ice cream, and had turned it into vichyssoise. He was relieved to be wrong. :-)
Recent Comments