Making Homemade Ice Cream With An Electric Hand Mixer Produces Amazingly Good Ice Cream Inexpensively!
So, you don’t have an ice cream maker…and you’re not ready to buy one but…you sure would love to try your hand at making a batch of homemade ice cream.
Making ice cream with an electric hand mixer can get pretty darn close to machine made ice cream. An inexpensive multi-speed mixer is all you need. It just takes a little more energy and a few trips to the freezer before it freezes solid.
After reading several books that told me ice cream could be made just by occasionally stirring the mixture while it was freezing, but finding that it still fell short of what I was looking for, I decided to try fluffing up the mixture in a somewhat similar fashion to how an ice cream maker expands the mixture.
For consistency in measuring my results, I again used my Vanilla Ice Cream Recipe as I did with the Cuisinart Ice-21 and the Nostalgia Electrics Ice Cream Maker, and prepared and chilled the custard.
Once the custard was thoroughly chilled and in a mixing bowl, I turned my electric hand mixer to lower and ran it around and around the bowl, just as I would use a mixer on any other recipe.
Keep going while the mixture bubbles around the edges. You want it fully covered in bubbles and basically whipped a bit thicker and fuller.
After about 5 minutes, when it’s covered in bubbles, fluffy and perhaps a bit thicker…pour it into a freezer container, put the lid on the container, and set it in the freezer on a level surface. Since it’s purely liquid, you don’t want it tipping and running all over, then freezing to the inside of the freezer.
Originally, my thought was to stir it every two hours for the next 6 hours so 2 hours later I pulled it out of the freezer and stirred the slightly frozen mixture through and through, making sure my spoon ran completely over the sides, bottom and corners of the container. Then I put it back in the freezer.
Well, the best laid plans and all…I fell asleep and woke up 4 hours later missing the next 2 hour moment in my plan. I pulled the container out of the freezer and stirred it up. It was more frozen than the last time I’d stirred it and small clumps of ice crystals were beginning to form throughout. I took my spoon back and forth over the ice crystal clumps, shaving them into nothing and incorporating it all back into the mixture.
When I felt I’d dissolved all of the ice crystal clumps and it was thoroughly mixed again, I put it back in the freezer and left it overnight to freeze solid.
After it was fully frozen I pulled it back out, got out an ice cream scoop and, to my amazement, it scooped beautifully! The texture was somewhat icier and colder than with an actual ice cream maker but more reminiscent of an old-fashioned ice cream I’d had at some point in the past. Where biting into ice cream made with a maker is soft, biting into this is a bit crunchier due to more ice that has formed within it. But it isn’t bad and the flavor was just as good as any other method!
It scooped into a waffle cone perfectly and when I used it in a root beer float you couldn’t even tell it was any different in texture because floats typically ice up ice cream anyway.
Would it have been better if I’d stirred it more often? Perhaps. If I try it again and leave the nap out, I’ll update this page and let you know. In the meantime, if you are ice cream makerless and tempted, give it a try! You might be very surprised at the treat you’ve so easily made without the expense of an actual maker!