Homemade Gelato

A few weeks ago, you may have seen this if you follow me on Twitter:

Yes, the weekend after we got home from Italy, I decided to make some gelato.  We’d eaten it every single day of our trip and I was going through withdrawal!  I did a little internet surfing and decided to try the recipe for vanilla gelato from this site.  I don’t totally understand the difference between gelato and ice cream, but it has something to do with fat and/or cream content.  Gelato has less, and ends up being smoother and lighter.  (Not to mention delicious.)

Here are the basic ingredients.  Milk, cream, and sugar.  A lot of recipes — ice cream and otherwise — call for “heavy cream,” but I have yet to find anything at the grocery store called heavy cream.  Instead, there is either half and half or heavy WHIPPING cream.  If the internet is to be trusted, heavy whipping cream = heavy cream, so there you go.  And yes, I used 2% milk because we didn’t have whole.  And yes, we buy organic dairy products.  Not because we’re hippies, but because 1) it tastes better and 2) it has a longer shelf life.  I don’t know why the organic milk always has a later expiration date, but it does.  Perhaps something in the processing?  Anyway, I digress.

I couldn’t find an actual vanilla bean at the grocery store like the recipe calls for.  I’m sure they were there, but I didn’t look very hard.  Instead, I just used regular vanilla.  And then we decided to add Oreos to make it vanilla cookies ‘n cream.  Yum!

So the main thing that this recipe called for that struck me as unusual compared to how I’ve made ice cream in the past is that you cook the cream/milk/sugar mixture.  I’m not sure why you do this, or what it actually does, but I guess it makes the sugar dissolve and probably changes the chemical makeup somehow. Maybe I should ask Alton Brown.

After the cooking part, I refrigerated the mixture for a few hours before dumping it into the ice cream maker.  Our ice cream maker has one of those bowls with the goo inside that has to be frozen in order to successfully make ice cream.  Fortunately our freezer is big enough that I can just leave the bowl in there all the time, so it’s always ready for times like this when I randomly decide to make gelato.  The only downside of the ice cream maker is that it’s pretty noisy.  But hey — it’s all in the name of frosty desserts, so I’ll survive.

Mmm, crushed Oreos.  These get added once the gelato has started to firm up.

Ta da!  Here’s the finished product.  The verdict?  Well, I have to admit that it really DIDN’T have the gelato-like texture I was hoping for — instead, it was just like all the ice cream I’ve made before.  (If you’ve never had homemade ice cream, the texture is different from the store-bought stuff to begin with.  It’s softer and smoother out of the ice cream machine, and really yummy, then becomes more like store-bought ice cream once you put it in the freezer.)

However, I’m not complaining — gelato or not, it was delicious, and we ate it all over the next few days.  I think I’ll try a different gelato recipe sometime and see if I get better results.  They all seem to involve cooking, but some involve straining the mixture, and some involve eggs as well.