Secret Tools And Tricks Of The Ice Cream Pros: How To Make Creamy Ice Cream

Lauren Resler's amaranth ice cream. What are your biggest problems making ice cream at home, When I talk to home cooks, I hear one issue again and again: how do you nail a perfect creamy texture that doesn't freeze up like a brick or turn icy over time, What do restaurants and ice cream makers get right that we're getting wrong, The pros have a few advantages on their side. 20,000 burning a hole in your pocket. But plenty of their tools and techniques would be perfectly at home in your kitchen or mine: good storage practices, natural stabilizers like gelatin or pectin, or alternative sugars you can order online and get delivered to your door. I spoke with nine ice cream pros, a mix of pastry chefs and ice cream specialists, to see how they keep their ice cream smooth and creamy.

Here's what they had to say, and what secrets you can steal for your own recipes. Most consumer-grade machines have a removable core that chills in a freezer and can only churn one small batch a time. Professional machines, on the other hand, range from the size of a small air conditioner (with a similar built-in compressor) to that of a free-standing fridge. One popular brand that comes in a range of models is a Carpigiani batch freezer, the Lamborghini of ice cream makers, with five-digit prices to match. Julian Plyter of New York ice cream sandwich company Melt Bakery, where he churns gallons of ice cream at a time.

Once his machine is up to speed, he can spin a batch in about ten minutes, a must for keeping labor costs under control. Imagine paying someone to churn a single quart of ice cream every half hour! Fast freezing also means smaller ice crystals, one of the keys to creamy ice cream. And in a commercial American-style batch freezer, paddles rapidly whip air into the base, adding a discernible fluffiness to the end result. At home, my vanilla ice cream is creamy and rich; when spun in a Carpigiani batch freezer, it's spectacular: full-bodied and unbelievably smooth. Tracy Obolsky's rice pudding ice cream sundae at North End Grill.

But most restaurants can't afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a super-fancy ice cream robot. Do these fancy machines make better ice cream, 750 machine doesn't make ice cream that's 15 times as good as a 50 version. You're paying for speed and output as much as quality. It's also worth remembering that good ice cream machines don't make good ice cream; people do. The takeaway: Ice cream pros have better machines than you do, but their needs are also different than those of home cooks. 1,000 machine if you aren't making gallons of ice cream at a time. Meredith Kurtzman's Gelato at Otto. If you're looking for the single greatest advantage pros have over come cooks, don't look to the ice cream machine—look to the freezer.

Plyter, which is why as soon as his ice cream comes out of the machine, it goes straight into a chest freezer that maintains subzero temperatures. By contrast, most home freezers are relatively warm, and their automatic defrost cycles slowly melt and re-freeze ice cream. Scoop shops and restaurants often have separate service freezers that warm the ice cream up to a softer, more scoopable temperature, between 0 and 10 degrees Farenheit. But once ice cream enters the service freezer, that's it—it should be kept there, eaten, or melted down, as repeated trips between storage and service freezers can make for icier ice cream. That's not to say all the pros have it easy. At New York's Otto, gelato master Meredith Kurtzman doesn't have a super-cold blast freezer at all, so she adapts her recipes to handle relatively warm freezer temperatures.