How to Keep Homemade Ice Cream Soft
Few desserts are more enjoyable than homemade ice cream. Unless, of course, your ice cream is so hard that you can only remove it from the container using a crowbar. While freezing time and temperature play a role in the level of softness, other factors can affect the consistency of your ice cream. Ingredient composition and quantity of items like sugar and alcohol affect the overall consistency of your homemade treat. Creating ice cream with perfect consistency requires you to address the issue at the ingredient level and storage time in the freezer. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Use concentrated sugar instead of plain granulated sugar. Sweeteners containing high fructose corn syrup, agave syrup or glucose create a softer consistency by reducing the freezing point of the ice cream. You can also add fructose naturally by increasing the amount of fresh blended fruit in your ice cream.
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Incorporate a complementary flavored cream alcohol. Obviously not all flavors of ice cream blend well with an alcoholic beverage, so choose one that matches well with the original flavor of ice cream. Substitute half the milk in the recipe for a sweet cream alcohol to reduce the overall freezing point and keep your ice cream soft.
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Avoid over-freezing your ice cream. Fresh ice cream tastes best when eaten within a few hours. Particularly with fruit flavors, freezing your ice cream for more than an hour reduces the flavor as the flavor enzymes begin freezing in the fruit. Store-bought ice cream uses additives and preservatives to stay soft; homemade recipes don't call for such additives, which makes the consistency of your ice cream more vulnerable to hardening in the freezer.
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Tips & Warnings
Experiment with different sweeteners and cream alcohols by creating mini-batches of ice cream rather than potentially ruining an entire quart.
References
- Photo Credit ice-cream image by AGphotographer from Fotolia.com
