ice cream maker woes
when i've been using my ice cream maker, which is a cuisinart kind with the frozen bowl that spins around a stationary plastic baton/scraper, to make soy-based and yogurt-based treats, there seems to be a ton of waste from the scraper not pulling all the frozen parts off the sides and bottom of the frozen bowl. i can't remember the problem being this severe with egg custard-based ice creams (but maybe i just don't remember). is it a texture/consistency issue with the new ingredients I'm using? would adding cookies or nuts to the mix help break up the side-frozen bits? is my blade somehow ill-fitted all of a sudden? anyone have a tried-and-true solution?
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6 Comments
Whether you've gor a hand-cranked wooden model or a frozen gel-filled electric bowl, your mixture is always going to be thicker and harder where it's coldest. The dasher not only churns your ice cream base, it also aerates it so that you get ice cream instead of milk popsicles. But like the beater on a KitchenAid, the dasher was not engineered to scrape clean the sides of the bowl.
I think Cuisinart makes a model with a non-stick lining--that's not a help to you now, but it's something to look forward to when you're in the market for another machine.
Until then, you can do two things:
1. Make sure you follow a proven recipe, preferably one with a cream:milk:sugar ratio of 2:1:5, whether you're using dairy or soy or sugar or honey or agave. If you're using soy milk, you might try adding a teaspoon or two of vegetable oil to your base mix before churning; otherwise, use soy cream. And make sure your yogurt is the whole milk kind. The sugar/fat proportion is important--allows you to churn your ice cream long enough to incorporate air before it freezes, but not so long that the mixture warms up and turns back into a liquid. If you're using heavy cream, it also prevents you from making butter.
2. Don't let your ice cream mix rob the cold from your bowl. Make sure all your ingredients are as cold as you can get them, just short of frozen, before pouring them into the ice cream maker's bowl. You'll have more "smooth and creamy" and less "chunky and hard" if your mixture is nearly as cold as your bowl is. Any additional ingredients, such as Oreos, Reese's cups, bananas or strawberries, should be chopped and frozen before adding it 10 minutes before you think your ice cream is done churning.
No matter what the recipe instructs, no matter what the owner's manual says, no matter what brand of machine it is, no matter if the recipe is dairy or non-dairy: When your mixture has reached the consistency of creamy mashed potatoes, stop churning and put it in the freezer.
I've always stopped the churning before the ice cream gets firm all the way through.
Also, sometimes (if I have the patience) I put all the ice cream away, then scoop out all the hard, stuck-on ice cream with a spoon and transfer to a food processor, and pulse until smooth....then add it to the "good" ice cream.
Hope this helps! I am shopping around for a better one.
It measures the specific gravity of your solution, which is totally unimportant. What is important is that for non-dairy concoctions, you need a reading of 12-15. If your mixture is too "dense", in other words, has too much sugar and therefore won't freeze well, add a few drops of lemon juice. If it is too "light", add some simple syrup. In either case, you're looking for a balance of 12-15.
I'm guessing that your mixture is too light, meaning that you have excess water floating around unbound, and that is what is causing the icy buildup in your bowl.