Ice Cream Base

This is a simple ice cream base recipe, originally from The New York Times. I guess this is actually a custard base, so you're technically making frozen custard instead of icr cream

Ingredients

• 2 C heavy cream
• 1 C whole milk
• ⅔ C sugar
• ⅛ tsp salt
• 6 large egg yolks (can use fewer, see notes)
• Flavorings (see notes)

Steps

1. In a medium pot heat cream, milk, sugar, and salt over medium heat to dissolve the sugar for 5 minutes. Remove from heat.
2. In a medium bowl whisk yolks. While whisking mix in ⅓ of the milk mixture, tempering the yolks.
3. Slowly mix the yolks back into the hot milk mixture. Return pot to heat, and heat to 170°F.
4. Strain yolk and milk mixture into a bowl. Cool to room temperature.
5. Cover and chill, atleast until cooler than room tempurature but preferably overnight. The cooler it is when you start, the less work your churn will have to do.
6. Churn in ice cream machine according to the manufacturers directions.
7. Move the soft ice cream into a freezer friendly container and chill in the freezer a few hours to harden. Leaving it overnight is best.

Notes

• You can reduce the number of egg yolks used to reduce richness of the ice cream (and eggy-ness). 3 is a good middle ground.
• You can change the ratio of cream to milk (and even use 2% or 1% milk) to reduce richness, as long as the total liquid volume is 3 C. Using half and half is a simple stand in.
• When mixing in liquid flavoring, do so after removing from the heat to cool. This will ensure they aren't partly cooked/boiled off on the stove.
• When mixing in solid items, like cookie chunks, mix or fold them in by hand after chruning the ice cream. This helps keep them from being broken up into unidentifiable pieces, and also from breaking your churning machine.
• When mixing in things in powdered form, like cocoa powder or spices, do so when mixing in tempered yolks in step 3. Most powdered things do best with being heated up slightly.