The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I’ve made ice cream before. In high school, my church youth group
used old-fashioned wooden buckets to make vanilla ice cream for the
social where the little kids did their end-of-summer musical. But I’ve
never been in charge of the recipe, and most of what I remember from
that experience is lots and lots of cranking, finding more ice and
salt, and then more cranking.

The Kitchenaid Ice-cream maker attachment to my mixer takes away all
the ice, salt, and cranking, since you get a nice cold bowl by
freezing a double-walled bowl with some sort of liquid between the
walls. It does take 15 hours or more in the freezer to chill the
bowl, plus time for the ice cream to "ripen" in the freezer after it’s
made. If I’d planned all this out well, and had nothing to keep me
from being home to make ice cream, I could have had real, tasty, hard
ice cream in less than 24 hours. However, since I didn’t plan quite
that well, it took a bit longer.

We put the bowl in the freezer before we’d even gone shopping for
cream. After going shopping, we discovered that the "beginner recipe"
(a vanilla custard) called for 2.5 c of light cream and 2.5 c of
half-and-half. We, not having actually read this particular recipe
before going to the store, had bought a pint of heavy cream. So we
halved the recipe, and used our heavy cream with 1% milk, instead.
The recipe was pretty simple:
Half of the cream got heated, then mixed with four egg yolks (another good reason to make a
half-batch, since I only had five eggs), and half a cup of sugar.
Then the whole thing got poured back into the bowl and heated again
(carefully, but not carefully enough, since we got some chunks that I
think were cooked egg not mixed in well enough)
Then we poured in the rest of the milk/cream, some vanilla (I put in 4
oz instead of the 2 that a halved recipe would call for) and a very little salt.

Sounds super easy, right? Absolutely. And it does taste very good.
However, that good is not (only) vanilla—there’s a much stronger
taste that dominates (and, admittedly, complements) the vanilla.

Whiskey.

Those of you who know me know I pretty-much don’t drink. But a few
years ago I was convinced that home-made vanilla is overwhelmingly
superior to the store-bought kind, so now I keep one or two bottles of
Jack Daniels with vanilla beans soaking inside. Six months is enough
to have very good vanilla that I can use in cookies, cakes, etc.
Even though I tend not to measure vanilla when I put it in a recipe, I
don’t usually notice the whiskey flavor at all.

This is an exception to that rule.

I even measured it, but the ice cream is definately
whiskey-flavored. It’s whiskey-vanilla, but the whiskey is undeniable.
I’m not sure if this would have been more or less true if I’d quickly
heated the vanilla before adding it to the custard base, but I did not
think of that. Eight hours in the fridge to chill the custard plus a
day or so in the freezer after being mixed as ice cream seem to have
reduced the flavor somewhat, but I also may have just gotten used to
it, or something. Maybe next time I’ll make chocolate…