Red Velvet Ice Cream

There are so many things that were new to me when I came to the US. One that stands out is Red Velvet Cake. I had never heard of it before coming to New Jersey. Now it is easily one of my favorite flavors.
I've seen it as an ice cream in the store. And I like to experiment, so I decided to try my hand at a Red Velvet Ice Cream. I made it very similar to the vanilla ice cream. I used buttermilk instead of regular milk and added some cocoa powder and vinegar - to stay true to the red velvet taste. Because I didn't know how buttermilk would react being heated with the egg, I just switched and used the cream for the custard. I knew that since I doubled the amount of cream used in the custard I would need to double the egg as well. This made it more rich, if you don't want it to be so rich just use 1 cup of cream for the custard and add the other cup when you add the buttermilk.

Red Velvet Ice Cream Recipe

6 egg yolks
2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp vinegar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 cup buttermilk
1 tbsp vanilla
red food coloring to desired color

Combine first four ingredients in a pot. Heat, stirring constantly, until almost boiling. (it will be nice and thick) Pour into a chilled bowl and add the last five ingredients.
Cover with plastic wrap - make sure the plastic wrap touches the batter - and chill for several hours.
Set up your ice cream maker. Freeze as per directions for your machine.
Pack into storage container and freeze for a couple hours before scooping.

**note: it's MUCH easier to really incorporate the cocoa powder well if you mix it with a liquid to form a paste, and then slowly add more and more liquid until it's easy to incorporate. This is a trick I do when making hot cocoa and it totally slipped my mind to do it this time.


I procrastinated photographing this and there is no photo because it disappeared so fast.

Vanilla Ice Cream

Well, That wasn't so bad.
I chose Vanilla because I was intimidated by the custard. It turns out it was MUCH easier than I thought it would be!

We sat down and ate some last night while watching Leverage. It was fantastic! I loved the texture right out of the machine too. It was so smooth and creamy. And so rich that we couldn't eat as much as we're used to eating from a store bought brand!

Vanilla Ice Cream Recipe
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1/4 tsp salt

2 cups Heavy Cream
1 tbsp Vanilla Extract

Chill a bowl. Combine first four ingredients in a 2qt pot. Heat over medium heat until just before it boils, stirring constantly. Pour into chilled bowl and stir until it cools a little. Put in the fridge to chill for a couple hours - stir whenever you think about it. This is the custard.
Set up your ice cream maker. Combine the cream and vanilla with your custard and pour into the ice cream maker. Freeze as per directions for your machine.
Pack into storage container and freeze for a couple hours before scooping.

Recipes

I've been all over the internet browsing Ice Cream recipes I want to try.
Last night I probably annoyed my Pinterest followers to no end by creating a pinboard of Ice Cream Recipes and pinning nearly 70 different delicious looking recipes. (No, I didn't just pin every single recipe I found, just the ones I want to try)

Turns out this challenge will offer me far more flavor opportunities than the grocery store.

Many of the recipes I have found involve making a custard first. This step requires cooking egg yolks with milk or cream, stirring constantly to prevent clumping. I'm nervous about this. It's this nervousness that made me decide to start this adventure with the most basic of recipes. I'm going to make a vanilla ice cream from one of my tried and true cookbooks.

My Personal Challenge

Hi, My name is Kathy, I'm an ice cream addict.
Ice cream is my go to comfort food. I want to eat better but I have a hard time walking through the freezer aisle at my local grocery store without stopping. There are so many interesting flavors out there.
I love reading books about food. I'm currently rereading The Omnivore's Dilemma for the dozenth time. I particularly love books that have an element of a challenge in them like The 100 Mile Diet, or Animal Vegetable Miracle. In both of those books the authors strive to eat only local foods for one year. I love the idea of becoming a locavore, and eventually I intend to feed my family mainly on foods that I've grown myself. Right now with two little girls under three years old I can't even keep my basil plant alive. (To be fair to myself it I did manage to keep it alive until we went away, during a heat wave, for a week.)
Michael Pollan collected folk wisdom about food into a book called Food Rules. One of the rules has played itself over and over in my head.
"Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself."
What really hits home in this rule is where he points out that the treats we consume regularly like fried foods, sodas etc used to be expensive and hard to make. This made them truly treats. Now food manufacturers have made them so easily accessible that we can, and do, eat them much more regularly. "If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies and ice cream."

I want to set myself a challenge. I'm not in a place in my life where I can do something extreme like No Impact Man. I wear too many hats right now to extend this challenge further - though I suspect I will add other foods to this list as my children become more independent and I can spend more time in the kitchen.

For the next year, (once the ice cream in my freezer is gone) I will only eat ice cream I've made myself.

This will be interesting since I have only made a shoddy kick-the-can vanilla ice cream before.