Coffee Ice Cream (Recipe!) and the magic of technology

“Jared Putnam,” I said above the comforting sound of an ancient whirring motor, “look at how technology is improving our lives!”

No longer would I spend hours sweating over a cold hand-crank ice cream maker. No, no longer! Life is a breeze now thanks to our brand-new Procter-Silex ice cream maker from the 1960s that we got at a thrift store for six dollars—we paid approximately one dollar per decade that it’s been around.

It also came with sexist racist heteronormative manual, I mean, recipe booklet.

Ice cream holds a special place in world history. This fly white lady is credited with making ice cream fashionable in the 1880s!

Now, my friends, I feel pride in what I have done here today. I have experimented with creating a recipe for coffee ice cream, and, BY JOVE, I like the results! The recipe below is a mashup of this gelato recipe from Epicurious and a recipe I found in La Cucina in which a recipe for coffee ice cream advises you to use 8 CUPS OF HEAVY CREAM and 2/3 cup coffee grounds. This seemed like someting I would want to avoid not necessarily because of the caloric value of 8 cups of heavy cream (I SPURN HEALTH FOODS!) but aghh the dread mouthfeel of 8 cups of frozen heavy cream! I also found a bunch of recipes that I did not want to follow as they called for as much as 1 1/2 cups whole coffee beans, which just seems so wasteful to me. You’re ignoring the entire middle of the bean! Dude, just grind that shit up and let the coffee joy happen!

So here it is, an extremely simple recipe for coffee ice cream. It’s a custardy-type of thing, and the best kind of ice cream I’ve ever made in my whole grown-up life!

Oh, and I want to mention that I roasted this coffee as well. In an air popcorn popper.

Coffee Ice Cream Recipe

Inspired by this here gelato recipe at Epicurious and a recipe that appears in the book La Cucina.

4 cups milk
2 cups heavy cream
40 grams coffee, ground
8 large egg yolks
1 1/3 cups sugar

Boil milk and cream together, stirring every once in a while in a vain attempt to keep a skin from forming on the top. A skin will form on the top. Stir it in, whatever. You’ll strain it later. Once the milk boils (at around 205 degrees, the perfect temperature for brewing coffee!) add the coffee. Stir it all in. Let it steep for a while—I let mine sit around for about 15 minutes.

Have a bowl, a fine mesh strainer, and some cheesecloth ready to pour your coffeemilk into. It will take a long ass freaking time for your coffeemilk to strain through the cheesecloth if you have a small strainer like I do, and it will seem like your coffee-steeping time will increase to, like, 25 minutes. Whatevs. It’s all cool. Press as much coffeemilk out of your cheesecloth as possible and toss your coffee grounds into the compost, because that shit is gold. Also, it’s worth noting that at this time you’ll probably be frustrated to realize that fresh skins are forming atop your now grounds-free coffeemilk. Balls! But fret not, because we’ll just strain it again anyway.

Now you’ll bring your coffeemilk, on med-low heat, up to the correct custard-making temperature, 175 degrees. Stir often. Curse the skins! At the same time (if you’re alright at multi-tasking) separate your egg yolks out and whisk them in a nice big bowl. Add the sugar and beat. Beat it hard. It should be really pretty, a light yellow. When your coffeemilk is at 175 degrees, remove it from heat and, whisking constantly, whisk a bit of the coffeemilk into the sugaryolks at a time, tempering the eggs.

Have a clean bowl and fine mesh strainer ready.

When your coffeemilk and sugaryolks are mixed together, return it to the pan and, stirring constantly over med-low heat, bring it all up to 185 degrees. Remove from heat! Immediately! Don’t wait, or disaster will strike upon your poor yolks, curdling them! Strain it into that bowl! Goodbye milkskins! We shan’t meet again!

You can now do the appropriate anti-custardskin measures, like pressing plastic wrap (or a humiliated freezer bag, in my case) against the custard. You can also make it cool all quick-like if’n you wanna by putting the custard bowl into a larger vessel and filling that larger vessel with ice and cold water and such. You know the tricks.

Now freeze into ice cream using your preferred method of freezing into ice cream! I used the approved 1960s Proctor Silex method of electrical ice cream maker freezing, which looks something like this.