Prepare Eggs for Pumpkin Ice Cream

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to make this delicious sweet and refreshing pumpkin ice cream. Our next step is going to be tempering the egg mixture. What this means is slowly raising the temperature of the eggs so that they're not going to curdle once we mix it in with the cream completely. We're just going to really dribble little bit of the cream in at a time while whisking very quickly. We want to make sure that we're not cooking the eggs too quickly. Otherwise, they're going to curdle, and that is going to ruin the ice cream. The last thing you want when making a custard is for the eggs to curdle. You notice there's some bubbles that we're getting, but that's not curds, so we're okay. I'm just using a 1/4 cup at a time to mix in. The object is to raise the egg's temperature. Get it at least to room temperature, but as close to possible as the temperature of the custard. When we started, because the eggs and cream were both refrigerated, they were cold. Obviously, we've heated up the cream in the pan, and now we've got to also heat up the eggs. This is an incredibly important step, and you want to do it as slowly as you can raising the temperature. You want to use a glass or ceramic bowl if you're doing this, because then you can constantly check the temperature. If you use a plastic bowl it's not going to be as obvious. Right now, I'm feeling the bottom of the bowl. It's still a little bit warmer, but it's still cool to the touch, which means we're going to keep on adding more cream."