Making ice cream can be very tricky. You cannot easily come up with creamy and soft ice cream that’s easy to scoop, and oftentimes you end up with hard frozen ice cream with the ingredients not blending well together despite the effort in mixing. Well, this is exactly why people invest on ice cream making workshops; they want to learn how to achieve perfect ice cream using their own set of skills. But even after undergoing training, it still takes a lot of practice, as well as the proper recognition of mistakes, in order to achieve ice cream that you’ve been trying so hard to create.
But what exactly are the common ice cream mistakes that you need to take note?
- The ice cream is too hard.
When the ice cream is too hard to be scooped, this is mainly because the ice has crystallized within the mixture already, while it was being stored in the freezer. Such situation arises when the ice cream mixture has not been churned enough before it was stored to freeze, and when the bowl used to churn the ice cream is not cold enough to maintain the required temperatures for the mixture to become smooth and creamy once it is stored to freeze.
The key way to avoid this is by making sure that the mixing rotations of the ice cream maker are very fast, so that they can churn the mixture in a quick but consistent manner. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, your mixing skills should likewise be fast and consistent otherwise it will leave room for ice crystals to form.
Also, the bowl should be frozen before it is used for churning the ice cream mixture. You must chill the bowl at least overnight so that it would be able to stay cold as the churning takes place.
- The ice cream has globules of milk after it has frozen.
Your ice cream may be soft and frothy, but you find globules of milk that have formed, making some parts of the ice cream “uncooked”. This can be due to over-churning, or you have churned the mixture too much that the milk particles have formed and not blended well with the rest of the ingredients.
What you can do to avoid this is by blending your key ingredients together properly and preferably while they are still warm, so that they have emulsified even before putting them into the ice cream maker. You can use an ordinary blender for this, or an immersion blender if you have one.
- The add-ins are gritty.
There are times when even if your ice cream has come out soft and frothy, you find your add-ins to be stone-hard and gritty, and not even chewable despite being coated with ice cream. This can be a big issue especially when you have added nuts, dried fruit, and marshmallows on your mixture they all ended up too hard to chew.
It is common for the add-ins to harden during freezing, but you can counter this by coating them with canola or coconut oil prior to adding them to your ice cream mixture. The oil helps maintain the tolerable levels of crunch for the add-ins even after they freeze, so you still get to enjoy them on your ice cream.
If there’s one thing you need to keep in mind, it’s that these mistakes are too common that even seasoned ice cream makers get to encounter them every once in a while. These only gives you more reason to undergo an ice cream making workshop; through workshops, you not only learn about these mistakes first hand, but also imbibe the ways on how to avoid them from happening frequently. And yes, through workshops, you are able to overcome these blunders and eventually come up with your own ice cream creations in the best ways possible.
https://food52.com/blog/13333-5-common-homemade-ice-cream-issues-how-to-fix-them
http://www.thekitchn.com/5-mistakes-to-avoid-when-making-ice-cream-221722
