Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream
I wrote a blog entry on the ice cream I made. Then I realized it was quite terribly boring. But oh well.
So, attempted to cook again yesterday. I'm calling it cooking because there WAS in fact some cooking involved, despite the fact I was making ice cream.
I googled for an eggless recipe and used this one. Apparently it's still really hard to find eggless recipes for homemade ice cream. Those recipes with egg were all made back when it was considered safe to use raw egg in food, but these days, it's a big no-no due to risks of salmonella poisoning. I don't know all that much about salmonella and what the risks actually are, but why bother risking it when eggless ice cream recipes taste just as good? Not to mention it's much more vegetarian-friendly if you're feeding a group.
Anyway, I managed to find that eggless recipe, but when I came home with the canned pumpkin, I realized I hadn't purchased plain canned pumpkin, but rather, canned pumpkin that had pumkpin pie spice and sugar pre-added. It's the stuff you get when you want to "make a pumpkin pie," and by "make," they mean, "add eggs, milk, and glop the can into a pie crust, taadaa, you made it from scratch!" Now, I'm not one to mock, as my cooking skills are very pathetic, but the way I figure things, you might as well buy the pie if you're gonna do that.
But I digress. Point being I'd accidently ended up with this stuff, so I was going to need to modify the recipe accordingly.
Also, I wanted to double the recipe. It doesn't actually give an estimate as to how much ice cream it's supposed to make. I think it's supposed to make about a quart of ice cream, though, after doing a little maths and conversion, (the liquid you put into the machine will expand a bit when it turns into ice cream, I'm told, so I am guessing it'll expand about half a cup? I don't know! XD) considering there's about 2 cups of pumpkin and 1 and a half cups of cream. (and a quart is 4 cups) That didn't sound like enough, I was making this for a large group, so I wanted to double it to get roughly 2 quarts of ice cream.
As such, I wanted 30 ounces of canned pumpkin, which just so happened to be a single can of the pre-sweetened/spiced pumpkin crap I bought. The recipe said to strain the excess moisture through cheesecloth and a colander, but after some fruitless hunting where the only cheesecloth in the house I located was an old, small used piece (eew), I decided to line the colander with paper towels instead. It said to let drain for at least 15 minutes, but I had doubled the amount so I reckoned on at least 30 minutes. (note: you'll need a colander with the sticky-outy bits so you can rest it over a bowl, because you're not going to fancy standing there holding it for 30 minutes) After 15 minutes, I blobbed the whole mess into a bowl and replaced the paper towels with fresh ones and blobbed the mess back into the colander, to try and 'flip' it and get the liquid out of the stuff on top as well. It sat there while I worked on the rest of the recipe, which actually ended up taking sort of a long time, so it actually got a chance to drain for quite a while.
Right, so. Meantime, I got 3 cups of cream to warm on the stove. I was a little unsure how much sugar to add. The stuff came pre-sweetened, but pumpkin pie is sort of not a very sweet pie, and ice cream is probably sweeter than the pie. I also had to consider I was doubling the recipe. In the end, I added half the normal doubled amount of brown sugar (just 1/4 a cup; it was dark brown, not light brown, so I thought it might affect the taste if I put too much, anyway) and the normal doubled amount of regular sugar (1 cup). After dissolving, the recipe said to let cool to room temperature. Which was taking forever. I shoved it into the fridge, thinking it might speed it up.
In the meantime I looked up online directions for my ice cream maker, because said directions were lost many years ago. The directions recommended that the ice cream mix should be 'chilled' before putting into the machine. No doubt to speed up the whole freezing process, but aaaw man, more waiting. This ice cream thing was taking all day. :oP
So after blending the cream/sugar and the pumpkin, (I couldn't resist sprinkling a little cinnamon and nutmeg into it while it blended, despite the fact the canned stuff probably had PLENTY added already) I put it in the fridge to cool while I had a snack. And then got back to work, preparing the ice cream machine. It was quite obnoxous getting the ice, because the bag I bought had the individual cubes fused together pretty good and needed an awful lot of smashing with a hammer to break apart enough to put into the machine. Ice sprayed out on the patio, the ice was quite a slurry of leaves and ice by the end of it, (nobody's raked the patio in ages) but hey, that part doesn't touch the ice cream, so no worries, just a bit annoying. After 20 minutes it showed so signs of slowing down, so I really poured a ****load of salt (I had been layering ice and salt like I was supposed to all along, but I guess it wasn't enough). About the 55-60 minute mark it finally had enough and the engine made the sound of it-is-now-a-solid-not-a-liquid. (Which is weird, really, because you'd think it would be a gradual process, but it was all of a sudden; one second it was normal, the next second it was not. Threshhold sort of thing I guess? It had the momentum to churn until it reached a certain point? PHYYYSICS?!)
I blobbed the stuff into a large plastic tupperware to let it finish freezing overnight (we used to put the metal can from the ice cream maker into the freezer to do this, rather than remove it from the can. BAD IDEA. Ugh. So horribly hard to scoop it out of there, and it tends to freeze too solid, I think.) It was the perfect level of consistency the next day. And it came out great! I'd deffo recommend it.
So, attempted to cook again yesterday. I'm calling it cooking because there WAS in fact some cooking involved, despite the fact I was making ice cream.
I googled for an eggless recipe and used this one. Apparently it's still really hard to find eggless recipes for homemade ice cream. Those recipes with egg were all made back when it was considered safe to use raw egg in food, but these days, it's a big no-no due to risks of salmonella poisoning. I don't know all that much about salmonella and what the risks actually are, but why bother risking it when eggless ice cream recipes taste just as good? Not to mention it's much more vegetarian-friendly if you're feeding a group.
Anyway, I managed to find that eggless recipe, but when I came home with the canned pumpkin, I realized I hadn't purchased plain canned pumpkin, but rather, canned pumpkin that had pumkpin pie spice and sugar pre-added. It's the stuff you get when you want to "make a pumpkin pie," and by "make," they mean, "add eggs, milk, and glop the can into a pie crust, taadaa, you made it from scratch!" Now, I'm not one to mock, as my cooking skills are very pathetic, but the way I figure things, you might as well buy the pie if you're gonna do that.
But I digress. Point being I'd accidently ended up with this stuff, so I was going to need to modify the recipe accordingly.
Also, I wanted to double the recipe. It doesn't actually give an estimate as to how much ice cream it's supposed to make. I think it's supposed to make about a quart of ice cream, though, after doing a little maths and conversion, (the liquid you put into the machine will expand a bit when it turns into ice cream, I'm told, so I am guessing it'll expand about half a cup? I don't know! XD) considering there's about 2 cups of pumpkin and 1 and a half cups of cream. (and a quart is 4 cups) That didn't sound like enough, I was making this for a large group, so I wanted to double it to get roughly 2 quarts of ice cream.
As such, I wanted 30 ounces of canned pumpkin, which just so happened to be a single can of the pre-sweetened/spiced pumpkin crap I bought. The recipe said to strain the excess moisture through cheesecloth and a colander, but after some fruitless hunting where the only cheesecloth in the house I located was an old, small used piece (eew), I decided to line the colander with paper towels instead. It said to let drain for at least 15 minutes, but I had doubled the amount so I reckoned on at least 30 minutes. (note: you'll need a colander with the sticky-outy bits so you can rest it over a bowl, because you're not going to fancy standing there holding it for 30 minutes) After 15 minutes, I blobbed the whole mess into a bowl and replaced the paper towels with fresh ones and blobbed the mess back into the colander, to try and 'flip' it and get the liquid out of the stuff on top as well. It sat there while I worked on the rest of the recipe, which actually ended up taking sort of a long time, so it actually got a chance to drain for quite a while.
Right, so. Meantime, I got 3 cups of cream to warm on the stove. I was a little unsure how much sugar to add. The stuff came pre-sweetened, but pumpkin pie is sort of not a very sweet pie, and ice cream is probably sweeter than the pie. I also had to consider I was doubling the recipe. In the end, I added half the normal doubled amount of brown sugar (just 1/4 a cup; it was dark brown, not light brown, so I thought it might affect the taste if I put too much, anyway) and the normal doubled amount of regular sugar (1 cup). After dissolving, the recipe said to let cool to room temperature. Which was taking forever. I shoved it into the fridge, thinking it might speed it up.
In the meantime I looked up online directions for my ice cream maker, because said directions were lost many years ago. The directions recommended that the ice cream mix should be 'chilled' before putting into the machine. No doubt to speed up the whole freezing process, but aaaw man, more waiting. This ice cream thing was taking all day. :oP
So after blending the cream/sugar and the pumpkin, (I couldn't resist sprinkling a little cinnamon and nutmeg into it while it blended, despite the fact the canned stuff probably had PLENTY added already) I put it in the fridge to cool while I had a snack. And then got back to work, preparing the ice cream machine. It was quite obnoxous getting the ice, because the bag I bought had the individual cubes fused together pretty good and needed an awful lot of smashing with a hammer to break apart enough to put into the machine. Ice sprayed out on the patio, the ice was quite a slurry of leaves and ice by the end of it, (nobody's raked the patio in ages) but hey, that part doesn't touch the ice cream, so no worries, just a bit annoying. After 20 minutes it showed so signs of slowing down, so I really poured a ****load of salt (I had been layering ice and salt like I was supposed to all along, but I guess it wasn't enough). About the 55-60 minute mark it finally had enough and the engine made the sound of it-is-now-a-solid-not-a-liquid. (Which is weird, really, because you'd think it would be a gradual process, but it was all of a sudden; one second it was normal, the next second it was not. Threshhold sort of thing I guess? It had the momentum to churn until it reached a certain point? PHYYYSICS?!)
I blobbed the stuff into a large plastic tupperware to let it finish freezing overnight (we used to put the metal can from the ice cream maker into the freezer to do this, rather than remove it from the can. BAD IDEA. Ugh. So horribly hard to scoop it out of there, and it tends to freeze too solid, I think.) It was the perfect level of consistency the next day. And it came out great! I'd deffo recommend it.