Homemade Ice Cream
As the weather gets nicer outside, there’s no better time for a sweet treat like ice cream! Americans have loved ice cream right from the start: George Washington ate it at Mount Vernon! But, in the early days of ice cream, making ice cream at home was strictly a luxury for the elite. Not only did ice cream require expensive ingredients like sugar and cream, there were no electric refrigerators or freezers to get the cream to freeze properly! Using salt to make ice even colder, people combined cream and sugar in a bowl, and then placed the bowl in a bucket of ice, mixing until the ice cream froze.
Even with this trick to freeze the ice cream, people still needed an ample supply of salt and ice, which had to be cut out of rivers and ponds during the winter and stored with the hope it'd last until summer. Plus, it took a lot of time and hard work to manually freeze the ice cream! First, you had to chip ice off of the large block that it usually came in, and crushing it to pieces small enough to fit into your bucket, and then nearly an hour of tedious mixing. Eventually, ice cream freezers with a hand crank were invented to make things a little easier, but it wasn’t until the invention of the electric freezer that ice cream’s popularity really took off!
Is this talk about ice cream is making you hungry? We’ve got a old-fashioned recipe here that you can use to make your own ice cream - no electricity required!
You’ll need:
- ½ cup half and half
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- ¼ teaspoon vanilla
- 1 sandwich size ziploc bag
- 1 gallon size ziploc bag
- About 3 cups of ice cubes or crushed ice
- ⅓ cup rock salt - the bigger crystals work better than table salt
- Dish towels
Combine the half and half, sugar, and vanilla in the smaller ziploc bag, and seal it tightly closed so that none of the salty ice gets inside! Put the ice and the rock salt in the larger bag and then add the smaller bag with the ice cream mixture, and seal up the larger bag. Now, start shaking and squeezing the bag until the ice cream starts to thicken! The ice will get very cold, so use the dish towels to cover the bag and protect your hands. After about 10-15 minutes, your ice cream should be all thickened and ready to eat - just remove the small bag, unseal it, and grab a spoon!
Why do you need to add salt to the ice? Plain old ice can only get so cold, reaching 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the freezing point of water. However, cream needs to be colder than 32 degrees to quickly freeze into solid ice cream, so chefs needed to find a way to get colder without electricity. Adding salt to ice actually makes the temperature colder, and it can get as cold as minus 5 degrees F! This is because the salt lowers the freezing point of water, stopping the melted ice from turning back into solid cubes and allowing the mixture to get much colder. This is also why you see trucks spreading salt on roads in the winter: by adding salt, the snow and ice melts instead of freezing and becoming slippery and dangerous.