Ad Hoc at Home: Vanilla Ice Cream

As I've been using Ad Hoc at Home as a springboard into the world of ice cream making, instead of skipping ahead to slightly more complicated recipes I decided to make what Keller calls the "base" for many of his ice creams and other desserts. Here are the ingredients needed for the basic vanilla ice cream (note the real vanilla beans):

After heating up the cream, milk, sugar, and eggs the main step in the recipe is removing the beans from the vanilla stalks and placing it in the mixture (along with the stalks as well) and allowing to sit at room temperature for a while to allow the mixture to absorb the vanilla flavor. Here is the mixture pre-trip to the fridge:

After letting the mixture sit in the fridge overnight, I mixed it in my Kitchen Aid ice cream maker/attachment and placed in the freezer to let sit and firm up. Here is the finished product:

The Verdict:

This was a very good ice cream. Like Ad Hoc's  other desserts, it is very rich and should be limited to 3 or 4 bites. The ice cream tasted the best for two days after I made it, after that it started to loose its texture and became a bit icy.

Ad Hoc at Home: Caramel Ice Cream

To go along with the beef stroganoff we made this past weekend, we also thought it would be fun to make one of the ice cream recipes from Ad Hoc at Home for dessert. We decided on the Caramel Ice Cream recipe because it sounded interesting and actually pretty simple.

Here are the ingredients, a pretty basic ice cream collection of egg yolks, milk and cream, sugar, and salt:

First off, you make the caramel by putting the sugar in a pot with some water and bringing to a simmer. It doesn't look like much now:

But after a while it starts to look familiar!:

After adding and mixing in the cream and milk, you strain and place the mixture in an ice bath:

After cooling in the fridge for some time. We ran our ice cream through our Kitchen Aid mixer attachment, then we put it in the freezer to firm up before serving. When we tasted it we were shocked how rich it was, and decided to balance it with something else...in this case a brownie. Here's the finished product:

Verdict

Very tasty but also very rich. Anymore than a scoop and the flavor becomes a bit too much in my opinion. It did taste great with the brownie (just a mix, not the Ad Hoc recipe) though. We also thought this would go great with apple pie instead of the traditional vanilla.