Vanilla Ice Cream.

One of the things that become hard to buy if you want to buy them plastic-free? Ice cream. Which is a pity, since I love ice cream. (Though this year, the everlasting, returning-daily rain has somehow curbed that craving a bit.)

We bought an ice maker gadget a few years ago, to be able to make our own ice cream, so the solution to plastic-free ice cream was already at hand. The problem? Finding really good recipes.

Especially for that staple of ice creams: Vanilla. Most recipes you find are really, really heavy on cream and egg yolks, and I plain refuse to use 6 egg yolks for a 6-person serving of vanilla ice cream. (Egg yolks, fat, and sugar are all ingredients that make the ice cream creamy, so much of them will make much creaminess.)

I thus went and tried something with just a bit of this, and that, and it actually turned out fantastic - it's not freezing up rock-solid, it's sweet but not too sweet, and it tastes a lot of vanilla. So here you go:

13 g vanilla sugar (homemade, it's a mix of 9 parts sugar and 1 part vanilla)
400 ml milk (full-fat)

Stir vanilla sugar into the milk and bring to a boil; simmer gently for a few minutes to bring out the vanilla taste. Take off the heat, mix in

70 g sugar
12 g cornstarch (stirred into a little bit of water)

and bring to a boil again. Mix in

100 g cream (cold)

- this should cool your mix down to about 70° C; if not, make it so. Then stir in

1 egg yolk

and stir gently until slightly thickened.

Let it all cool off, place into the fridge until it's really cold through, then use your ice maker to make ice cream from this.

And if you do... let me know how you like it!