Vanilla Ice Cream with a Tempered Custard Base

Hi, I'm Heather Bertinetti, and you're watching eHow.com. Today I want to talk about tempering. Tempering is all about eggs. And when you're talking about eggs and why we need to temper them. I think the best example here would be vanilla ice cream. So, let's get to it and we'll go through the whole process together. So, first I have half a quart of cream and half a quart of milk. I'm going to put this in my sauce pot here. Perfect, I'm going to turn the heat on and we're going to bring this to a boil. Now, because we're making vanilla, you can either take a bean and scrape half a vanilla bean, or you can just put vanilla extract. Today I'm going to do both just to show you. So, when scraping a vanilla bean, it's pretty simple. Take a pod and lay it flat. And what I do is I take the back of my knife, and I kine of smush all the seeds down with the back of my knife. And then I run it through and split it in half. At this point when you have two halves, turn it over and now take the back of your knife, not the blade side, and you can just scrape out all the beans and run it down just like that. We'll add that to our sauce pot. Do the other side of the beans. So, now that our seeds are in the pot with our milk and cream, just take the rest of the pod and throw it in the pot. We're going to strain this out later. It just gives it an extra flavor. Kind of nice. So, now on to the eggs. I've a teaspoon of vanilla extract here, just to pep up the vanilla flavor a bit more, and ten yolks. I have a cup of sugar and to this I'm going to take half of a cup of sugar, you can eyeball this, you don't really half to measure half. It's not going to do that much. I'm going to put that with the yolks and the vanilla and whisk this around. Make sure it's all incorporated, get all the lumps out and it's smooth. The rest of my sugar I'm going to dump in the pot. Give this a little stir. Now I know that by the time I do this step, my milk and my cream is not going to be boiled yet, right? It's still going to be lukewarm. And here's a little trick. When you add sugar to egg yolks, yolks especially, it starts to cook the yolk. OK. So, you're going to get all these little membranes. So, here's a little tip to not get the membranes. It'll make tempering a lot easier. With a spoon, take about, I don't know, a quarter of a cup of the cream and milk mixture and add it to your yolks and sugar. So, just like that, just whisk it in. So, when you boil the milk and cream, a slight skin seems to form on top. This is totally normal and it's going to rise as soon as it comes to a first boil. Be careful. At this point, it's starting to rise and it's starting to bubble. So, we'll shut our heat off and relax it. If your milk or cream mixture looks like it's ever going to boil over, and you see it coming up to the top, this looks a little silly but I kid you not, it works. Just blow on it and it'll subside. Because in essence you're breaking the skin. Now, that we're a boil, I shut my heat off and this is where we're going to temper it. And the whole idea behind this tempering process is these eggs are cold. And this is extremely hot. And eggs re so temperamental, that when you put the extremely hot liquid into the eggs, if you do it all at once, you're going to have scrambled eggs and they're going to cook on you. And that's what we want to eliminate. So, we take a ladle and in small batches we're going to whisk in the hot cream and milk mixture into our eggs. So, we do the first one and incorporate that. The best way to figure this out is if you touch the side of your bowl you can feel that these are still cold. Basically I want to add enough cream to touch the side of the bowl and make sure that this is the same temperature as this. Once you have a couple of ladles incorporated, you can always pick up the pot and pour a little in. Perfect. Now, I feel the side of my bowl and it's warm. Now we're to transfer this back into the pot, still with our heat off. Perfect. Let's turn our heat back on. And I put it on a medium to high flame, constantly whisking. So, now that my ice cream base has come to what we call nape', and I'll show you what that means. I'm going to take a spoon, this is the best way to check this out. Dip the spoon so it coats the back of it and fun your finger and see how it holds the line and it's not running through. That's when you're at the perfect consistency and the eggs have cooked enough. So, put that aside. I'm going to just strain this off. You have to remember that what we just made was a custard and because there's so many eggs in a custard, you can't put a hot custard into the refrigerator because it'll clump up and it'll curdle and spoil on you and that can be very dangerous. So, cool it over an ice bath, just ice cubes and cold water and then stick it in the refrigerator. When you have an ice cream base you can either turn it the same day after it's already been cooled or you can turn it two to three days after. OK. So, the longer it sits, if you have flavorings like vanilla or chocolate or whatever in the refrigerator is what we call maturing of the flavors, and it'll become more and more intense the longer that it sits in there. But no more than three days because it will spoil. If you're fortunate enough to have an ice cream machine like this model here, I suggest the cylinder that you're going to turn the ice cream machine in, you keep in the freezer over night or a couple of hours, however much time you can. Because the colder the cylinder is, it helps to just speed the process along. OK. That's really all it does. And then when you put it together, and you start turning, whatever container you're going to take your ice cream out of, and to hold it in should be frozen as well. So, if you're going to serve it in ice cream dishes or whatever you'd like, I suggest keeping those frozen as well. All right guys, our ice cream looks beautiful, completely done. I hope you learned a lot about tempering eggs. Remember, it's not that hard. A couple of easy steps, you're in there. I'm going to enjoy this. Catch me next time on eHow.com. I'm Heather Bertinetti. Take care.