Dorm room strawberry ice cream

After reading a few posts on the blog about ice cream, I thought back to a few recipes i had seen online for ice cream, and with a few of my friends out of town for the long weekend, I had plenty of time to give it a try.

But I faced the same problem we all face when trying to cook in the dorms- limited ingredients, limited equipment, and a limited budget. So I looked for a way around this. I found an article online about making ice cream without an ice cream machine, which looked easy enough to do. Once I knew how I was going to make the ice cream, I tried to find a suitable recipe, without too many ingredients or too many steps. I found that most recipes for homemade ice cream instruct you to make a custard with eggs first, likely to increase the richness and creaminess of the ice cream to compensate for the less effective home ice cream machines. I knew that I didn't have the equipment to make a custard, so I kept looking. I eventually found a very simple recipe that called for only strawberries, sugar, cream, milk, lemon juice, and vanilla extract. I chose to eliminate the vanilla extract to reduce the cost, and because it would have a negligible impact on the flavor of the ice cream.

I walked to publix on Sunday afternoon to pick up ingredients. I spend $4 on a pound of strawberries, $1 on a cup of heavy cream, $1 for a small bag of sugar, and $0.19 for a lemon. So in total, I spent $5.19 to make my ice cream.

I was busy on Sunday, so I started making the ice cream at 7:00 on Monday night. I took my mug to Brittain to get the milk that I needed, borrowed a metal bowl from my roommate, and sat down to get started.

The first order of business was to make the base for the ice cream, which would be frozen to create the final product. The first step in the recipe was to puree half of the strawberries with the sugar and coarsely mash the remaining half. Back home I would have used a food processor or an immersion blender, but all I had was a fork. I started by hulling all of the strawberries and putting them in the bowl. Here's what it looked like at that point:
I added the sugar and lemon juice, and "pureed" the strawberries as best as I could. After about 10 minutes of stabbing and mashing, I had a sore forearm and this:Not a bad result, actually. Last into the mix were the cream and milk. I couldn't help but notice that there was a LOT of the strawberry mixture for the amount of cream and milk that went in, probably pretty close to a 1:1 ratio. Here's what the base looked like once it was all mixed.Here's where the alternative (no machine) method of making ice cream started. For those who don't know, the idea behind an ice cream machine is that it mixes the ice cream as it freezes, so that air gets incorporated into the mix, and it doesn't just freeze into one solid mass. The suggested way around this was to put the bowl into the freezer, and come back and mix it vigorously every 15 minutes to incorporate air and keep the mix from freezing solid.

So the bowl went into the freezer, and I sat down to do some homework and studying for a test I had the next day. I mixed the ice cream every 15 minutes and took notes when I saw interesting things happen. Here's what I wrote.

30 minutes- looking a little thicker, bowl is cold, very small bit of freezing just around the edge, needed a bit more sugar so i added another 1/4 cup

1.5 hours- thickening up in the middle, fairly thick buildup of semi-frozen ice cream along the rim of the bowl, no ice on the bottom. Took picture:


2 hours- Lots of solidified ice cream on the edges, seems creamy, not icy, when mixed looks like pancake batter

3 hours- melted around the edges . Fridge broken!

4- fridge back, ice cream back to normal

5- almost fully frozen, close to soft-serve consistency, but it should be firmer

After 5 hours, it was close enough that it didn't need mixing anymore, so I went to sleep. I woke up at 11:00 on Tuesday morning to check on it, and it was completely frozen. The consistency seemed to be better than I had expected; I had assumed that the ice cream would be a really icy because of the lack of constant mixing. I ran back to my room, grabbed my fork and a few cups, and put the ice cream into a few of the 16oz plastic cups I keep in my room. It filled about two and a half of the cups, so I had made over a quart of ice cream. Not bad for $5! Here's what my finished product looked like (sorry for the sideways/blurry picture):
I invited a few of my friends and some guys from my hall to try it. The result was even better than I had expected. The ice cream was creamy, but slightly more icy than store-bought ice cream. But the strawberry flavor was INTENSE, way more pronounced than anything you could find in a store. There were chunks of strawberries distributed throughout, but even the plain ice cream was full of flavor. It may have been the fresh strawberries that did it, but I think the sheer volume of strawberry material that went into the mix contributed as much or more to the strong taste. Thinking about it, that probably also contributed to the icier texture. But everyone agreed that the strong strawberry taste actually went well with the unorthodox texture. The finished product felt like a cross-breed between an ice cream and a sorbet: it had both the richness of ice cream as well as the strong flavor and refreshingness (is refreshingness a word?) of a sorbet.

The guys got through one and a half pints of the ice cream, leaving me with only one cup to hoard for myself. I've eaten it throughout the week in small rations. You only need a little bit of this stuff to be happy. The flavor is THAT strong.

All in all, it turned out fantastically, and it's something that I definitely would make again.

I'm going to try to make a few other low-budget "dorm room" dishes throughout the semester. It'll be nice to be able to make something other than ramen when I'm hungry.

Here's the recipe if you're interested in making this:

1 pound of strawberries
1 ½ cup sugar
¾ tsp fresh lemon juice
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup whole milk

Hull the strawberries, add sugar and lemon juice. Mash strawberries as much as possible. You want most of it to be puree-like, but with some larger chunks still in the mix. Add the cream and milk, mix thoroughly. Put mixture in freezer. Check on it every 15 minutes, scraping frozen ice cream off the sides and mixing the mixture vigorously. Continue every 15 minutes until the ice cream is too hard to mix. Let freeze overnight before eating.