Summer is the season par excellence for ice creams and sorbets, those desserts with which to cool off on hot days. Preparing them at home can be a good activity to test your cooking skills and unleash your culinary creativity. It can also be a more natural and economical alternative to industrial ice cream. But to open the freezer and find a solid mass full of ice crystals after the effort of whipping the cream, mixing the ingredients and waiting hours for it to freeze is quite disappointing.
Making desserts at home can seem like an impossible mission if we don’t get the product we were waiting for. And making ice cream is no exception. The most common mistakes that cause this dessert to crystallize are caused by not using kitchen utensils properly or by mishandling the ingredients. Chef Miquel Antoja explains that, at home, “the freezing process, not having a professional machine, is slower.” This extra time is the perfect opportunity for those pesky ice crystals to start forming that give your ice cream a gritty texture.
But why does ice cream crystallize? Even though you haven’t added water to the mix, the little ice cubes seem to multiply out of control. Let’s start with the basics. To make ice cream, the main ingredient needed is liquid cream. About 75% of the cream is made up of water, followed by fat molecules. So, depending on how the cream is handled, an ice cream with more or fewer ice granules will be obtained, either “because it is excessively creamy or because it is very watery,” says Antoja.
In short, you have to treat the cream with care so that the ice cream does not crystallize. “The fundamental thing to make ice cream is to generate air in the fat particles that we have in the ingredients,” explains Ecuadorian pastry chef María Laura Holguín. For this it is important to always beat the ingredients to give them creaminess, either with electric whisks or with a pastry balloon. However, it is not necessary to overdo it either, since if the cream is cut, its water and fat parts will separate. In this case, it is better to start over.
In order to give the cream that perfect point of creaminess, it is ideal “for the dough to be cold, more or less at 4º C, before whipping it”, explains Antoja. For this, it is enough to refrigerate the cream a few hours before starting, thus ensuring that it is at the ideal temperature to obtain a creamy texture.
In addition to cream, sugar is also essential. Not only will it give ice cream its characteristically sweet flavor, but it will help lower the freezing point of the mixture. “Under normal conditions, water freezes at 0º C, but when it enters a solution with the sugars, the water will no longer freeze at that temperature,” they explain from the Italian ice cream school Gerogelato. Something in which Antoja agrees, which also suggests using between 90 and 150 grams of sugar per liter of ice cream to keep it creamy without crystallizing.
“Sugar is what determines whether crystallization occurs or not,” Holguín clarifies. But the difference between homemade ice creams and those made professionally is that, for the latter, invert sugars such as trimoline are usually added. It is not an ingredient that you normally have in the pantry. But, fortunately, condensed milk can have the same effect: “condensed milk is the perfect helper for making ice cream at home and avoiding crystallization, because you are using inverted sugar,” says Holguín.
“Ice cream formulas are carefully balanced and calibrated mathematical equations to achieve specific results,” says recipe developer Stef Ferrari. And it is that making ice cream is much more than just whipping the cream, adding sugar and some flavoring, and letting it freeze. Like any sweet recipe, accuracy and attention to detail can make the difference between success or failure. That is why below you will find a series of tricks so that your next homemade ice cream is better than ever.
Accuracy in confectionery is overwhelming if you are looking to make desserts at home. But you don’t need to be an expert ice cream maker or have sophisticated kitchen utensils to have fun making ice cream. In fact, Antoja assures that “it is enough to have a bowl, a whisk and a pastry tongue”. If you want to prepare something even easier, this recipe does not require an ice cream maker or blender. Go ahead and make your own ice cream!
