I just had a bowl of ice cream with my kid. He’s two. I want to feed him things that represent “food” as closely as possible. Hence, all the gardening, chickens, and what-not.
I try to buy local and reasonably organic (knowing that the standards for organic have become kind of bureaucratic and exclusionary for local producers…)
So I often buy Tillamook. It’s right down the street from us. They sell it at my local supermarket.
Tonight, I looked and saw that it’s got artifical color in its strawberry ice cream. And… polysorbate 80… and microcrystalline cellulose… and yer mono and di-clycerides…
“The terms mono-glycerides and di-glycerides are listed on the labels of most bakery goods, and other processed foods as well as on many frozen food combinations. The MGs and DGs added to bread doughs are usually by-products of fats and oils processing such as partial hydrogenation and various forms of extraction and interesterification processes. Even though they do have some caloric value, they are not counted as fats, and the fatty acids are not identified as having a particular composition. If they are fatty acids with trans bonds, they are not likely to be identified as such, nor would they be identified as any particular fatty acid.”
Good god… what IS that stuff?
I’ve made ice cream lots of times. It’s got cream, sugar, and some egg yolks and vanilla. If you want strawberry ice cream, you cram some strawbs in there.
I buy ice cream, among other things, out of sheer laziness. I figure they’ve got giant freezers, loads of cow-udder-fresh cream and what-not. Surely, it must be more efficient for Tillamook to make a bucket of ice cream than it would be for me to do it. Tillamook. They’re right over there. I drive through on the way to the coast.
No. In fact, somehow, the bean counters have successfully argued that it’s BETTER to put a bunch of weird-ass chemical crap into something as simple as ice cream even though it’s going to be shipped about 20 miles and frozen the whole time. Gad.
What have we learned here?
Well, while organic doesn’t mean that it wasn’t shipped here from Chile (i.e., a carbon footprint the size of the great outdoors), local doesn’t mean it hasn’t got loads of god-knows-what in it.
You want ice cream? Get an ice cream maker (they’re about $40 or so). Get some cream, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and strawberries. Make yer own. It takes about no time, and the end product is twice as good as anything you can buy. You can buy your cream from Tillamook if you’re not grossed out by now.
2 c. whole milk
1 c. cream
6 egg yolks
3/4 c. sugar
2 T. vanilla
Heat half the milk and the sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Beat the other half of the sugar and the yolks in a bowl until light yellow. Mix (temper) the hot milk into the yolks slowly. Let cool. Stir in the cream and vanilla.
Pour into an ice cream machine and churn until frozen. Transfer to another container and put in the freezer until good and frozen.
No diglycerides. No hexamethylcaleate. No Roundup. Just fat and sugar the way God intended ice cream to be.
Jeez. That sucks. Chemicals in food make me really angry.
Would you consider just giving me some of the fresh stuff *you* make? The last thing I need is another device fighting for space in my limited kitchen cupboards.
Excellent post! I heartily agree with you. And thank you for the recipe. I do make my own ice cream sometimes, but have not used as many egg yolks. I will try your recipe next time. When I buy ice cream in the market, I buy Breyer’s.
Yeah, it’s kinda sad. That stuff’s in practically everything. I guess the thing that caught my notice was that I’d actually purchased their stuff on the misguided assumption that it was “better” than something from Ben and Jerry’s or whatever… because it had the name of a town near here on it.
Anyway, Jen, sometimes we make it without eggs at all. That was just one recipe we’ve used when we feel like we need to accelerate the natural hardening of our arteries or have too many eggs around.
If the ingredients are fresh, you can hardly go wrong with a bunch of milk, cream, sugar, and whatever flavor du jour you’re into.
DK, for what it’s worth, it can be done without a machine. Just mix up yer stuff, cool it down in the fridge for a couple of hours, and then stick it in the freezer.
When it just starts to freeze around the outside, take it out, beat it creamy again, and repeat. It’ll take more work, but you should end up with perfectly nice frozen fat and sugar. The only problem is that you tend to get more ice crystals that way.