Mint Strawberry Ice Cream

At the farmer’s market, there was a lot of good looking strawberries and mint, and since ice cream is always good to have around, I decided to make some ice cream!

Preface

In order to make a rich but not too fatty ice cream, a fat content of around 17% is preferred. Anything above 18% fat content will leave a fatty film in your mouth, and since this ice cream will use a custard base, we need to further decrease the fat content (due to the additional fat the egg yolks bring). So, given that most heavy creams are arounds 30-36% fat content, and whole milk is 3.5-5% fat content, we need to calculate using the following formula:

\[ \begin{aligned} C_{total}=\frac{v_{milk}}{v_{milk} + v_{cream}}*C_{milk} + \frac{v_{cream}}{v_{milk} + v_{cream}}*C_{cream} \end{aligned} \]

given 1 part of cream, we can solve for the \(v_{milk}\)

\[ \begin{aligned} v_{milk} = \frac{C_{cream} - C_{total}}{C_{total} - C_{milk}} \end{aligned} \]

So for a total of 17% content:

\[ \begin{aligned} v_{milk} = \frac{0.35 - 0.17}{0.17 - 0.035} \end{aligned} \]

Thus, \(v_{milk} = 1 \frac{1}{3}\)

Ingredients

• 1 pint heavy cream (no thickeners like carageenan and gums, organic and local preferred)
• 1 \(\frac{1}{3}\) pint whole milk
• \(\frac{1}{2}\) cup granulated sugar
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 cup chopped strawberries
• 1 bunch of mint (see photos below)

Chopped to size:

Process

Infusing the cream

To start, mix the milk and the cream to form the ice cream base. Put this on very very low heat, and add the mint leaves plucked from the mint leaves, and let this simmer for a few hours. Keeping the temperature low will help prevent the milk from scalding, and will also allow the mint to infuse into the milk mixture gently. After some of the color from the mint leaves is transferred to the cream mixture,

Strain out the leaves, making sure to get all of the bits and pieces.

Add in the sugar.

Add the strawberries. We want to cook the strawberries a little, so that they are softer and they impart some of their flavor into the ice cream itself. With the heat still low, cook for another 15 minutes or so.

Custardization

Mix the 4 egg yolks in a separate bowl. In order to not scramble them, spoon in one spoon at a time some of the hot cream mixture, until the volume is about doubled.

Then, take the bowl of egg yolk mixture and reincorporate it with the main cream body. Slowly bring it up to 168F, stirring constantly. Either use a thermometer to check, or just remove from heat once it is thickened to a nappe (coats the back of a spoon). Once you have reached this point, remove from the heat source and cool the mixture in the fridge.

After cooling, the mixture should look like:

Churn

Once the mixture is cool and your churner is cold (pretty much as cold as you can get it), add the mixture to the churner, and churn until thick. Then, move this thickened mixture to a container to finish the cooling process in the freezer. After 6 or so hours (depending on your freezer temperature), it should be ready to eat!