35.3 Ice cream and frozen desserts

Still-frozen and churn-frozen

• Ice: water, sugar and fruit juice, with no dairy.
• Sherbet: fruit juice and sugar stirred into milk.
• Ice cream: cream and half-and-half sweetened and flavored.
• Frozen mousse: whipped cream with sugar and flavor, rich in fat and air, sometimes set with a little gelatin.
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Small crystals

The aim is small ice crystals. Their size depends on the interfering ingredients in the mix and on how it is made, so it varies between desserts: an ice is expected to have much larger crystals than a mousse. Whatever the kind, a frozen dessert should taste of what it is, feel smooth rather than grainy, and be firm yet easy to spoon. Why crystals grow, and what stops them, is in see chapter 7: Ice cream.

The United States standards

In the United States, the 2022 Code of Federal Regulations sets what a commercial frozen dairy dessert must contain before it can use the name. Some of these rules may not apply to products labeled "light" or "reduced calorie".

Both must contain nutritional sweeteners. Figures from the United States 2022 Code of Federal Regulations.

Using an ice cream freezer

The machine itself is described in see chapter 3: Ice cream machine. To use an electric freezer cooled by ice and salt:

• Wash and rinse the can, the dasher (the paddle inside) and the lid.
• Pour the cold mix into the can, fit the dasher, put the lid on, and set the can in the outer tub.
• Mix coarse rock salt with crushed ice at 1 part salt to 6 parts ice, by volume. Put about 3 inches of ice in the bottom of the tub, then add ice and salt in layers, packed a little higher than the mix inside the can.
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• Run the machine for 20 to 30 minutes.
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• Pack the dessert into pint containers, cover them, label them and put them in the freezer.

Ice cream, sherbet, ice and mousse

Vanilla ice cream. Stir ¾ cup of half-and-half with ½ cup of sugar and 1½ teaspoons of vanilla until the sugar has dissolved. Add 1½ cups of whipping cream and churn.

Orange milk sherbet.

• Rub grated orange zest into the sugar.
• Add lemon and orange juice, and stir until the sugar dissolves.
• Stir this slowly into very cold milk.
• Churn. If the milk curdles a little, the frozen sherbet's texture does not suffer.
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Cranberry ice.

• Boil water, sugar and a dash of salt until the sugar dissolves.
• Let it cool.
• Add cranberry juice cocktail and lemon juice.
• Still-freeze part of it in a loaf pan covered with foil, and churn the rest.
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Fruit or apricot mousse.

• Soften gelatin in cold water and dissolve it with heat, then stir it into the fruit.
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• Whip cold cream with a pinch of salt until it starts to thicken.
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• Add the sugar, and whip on to soft peaks; for the fruit mousse, stop before it is stiff.
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• Fold the cream into the fruit.
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• Pour into a pint container, cover, label and freeze.

Freezer safety and storage

Keep frozen desserts at −18°C (0°F) or colder. If the freezer warms above that, food can lose color and vitamins, and chilling it down again does not repair the damage.

Wrap everything well. Food left open in the freezer dries out on the surface and shows white or gray dry patches, called freezer burn, which spoil both texture and flavor. The cause is sublimation: ice on the surface turning to vapor and leaving tough, dry spots. Rotate stock first in, first out, which takes extra care in a chest freezer.

An ice cream base made with eggs, such as the French one in Dessert sauces above, is a cooked egg mixture. It follows the custard rules, 74°C (165°F) for 15 seconds and then two-stage cooling, and only a cooled mix goes into the freezer can.