For a while now, I have had a hankering to try making ice cream from scratch. Homemade ice cream always sounds so creamy and deluxe. The problem is that I am averse to spending money on an ice cream machine. I remember making ice cream once as a kid and the machine we used was heavy and awkward and a took up lots of storage space. Ice cream machines today are smaller and more efficient, but I still take issue with owning something that has such a specific and limited purpose (the “uni-taskers” as Alton Brown calls them.) So, when I stumbled across this post on David Lebovitz’s blog, in which he describes how to make ice cream without a machine, I bookmarked immediately.

The process that David outlines in his blog is pretty simple. You make your ice cream base according to the recipe of your choice (I used David’s basic vanilla.) After chilling the mixture well in the refrigerator, put it in a deep bowl and place it in the freezer. Every half hour, you want to scrape the frozen ice cream from the sides of the bowl and mix it back into the unfrozen portion using a heavy spoon, whisk or hand blender. It is important to mix thoroughly and vigorously. By breaking up the large ice crystals that are forming, you will create a light, uniform and creamy ice cream. After about 3 hours, your ice cream should be complete!

Yesterday ended up being the perfect day for making homemade ice cream - it was beautiful outside, my brother was coming over for dinner and I got out of work a little early so I had plenty of time to experiment in the kitchen. My ice cream turned out very creamy and soft, much closer to soft serve than store bought. Not surprisingly, it started to melt quicker than commercial ice cream. Pre-chilling the serving bowls would probably not be a bad idea. One of the great things about making ice cream from scratch is that you know exactly what is going in it, in my case lots of heavy cream, eggs and organic sugar. Hey, they may not be the healthiest of ingredients, but at least they are natural and I know where they come from. I flavored my ice cream with nothing more than a single fresh vanilla bean. The vanilla flavor was really strong but in a warm, spicy way not in a fake way like you sometimes get with vanilla extract. And, I just love seeing those little vanilla seeds everywhere (even if it did make my ice cream look a tiny bit gray!)