Alex Quinn's Japan Journal

7/11/2005, Making ice cream

I've been thinking of buying an ice cream maker lately.  At first it was a way to save money.  I think I normally spend around $50 on ice cream in a month.  Last summer it was at least $100.  I did the math and found that I wouldn't save any money with an ice cream maker.  But, it sounded like fun so I went for it anyway.  I got a National ice cream maker yesterday in Osaka with Akemi.  It would have been about 5500 (≈$55) but Akemi contributed her "point card" and got me a ≈1200 (≈$12) discount.  The machine runs inside your freezer on lithium batteries.

I gave it a go tonight.  The instructions and recipe booklet are both in Japanese, which was a fun and ultimately successful challenge.  The recipe made about a pint of vanilla.  3 egg yolks in that pint, along with whipping cream, milk, vanilla, and sugar.  Japanese vanilla extract seems to be a good 4 or 5 times as strong as American vanilla extract.  You only use a few tiny drops even for vanilla ice cream.  The ice cream came out good.  I was so excited, I kept pulling the thing out of the freezer, opening it up, and taking tastes of the little bits of frozen stuff that had accumulated.  Terribly impatient, I am.  Unfortunately, I learned that homemade ice cream doesn't keep so well.  It gets hard.  The instructions say to eat it all right away.  Darn.

My first batch of homemade ice cream.  Vanilla.

And the ice cream maker I used to make it.

I'm looking forward to making other flavors.  There are recipes for green tea, ginger, soy milk, yogurt, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream as well as a couple sorbet recipes.

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