Shortcut vs. Showstopper - Making Perfect Ice Cream _ Melissa Clark _ NYT Cooking

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enif I'm gonna buy ice cream I go for the weird flavor I go for the flavor I've never had before wow you know I've never had saffron blueberry chocolate and so I'll go for that because I always want to try something new but if I'm gonna make ice cream and I'm gonna serve it to people I want to go for the flavor that's the simplest if you can make perfect vanilla caramel chocolate oh and strawberry too that's all you need hi I'm Melissa Clark cooking Studio to make two different kinds of ice cream today here's the thing you can make really delicious things and they don't have to be that hard they can be so easy and so simple but sometimes you really want to pull out all the stops you want a delicious best possible version of a dessert and to me I think that's really fun I'm going to make a shortcut really easy no Churn ice cream and then I'm going to make the best salted caramel custard ice cream imaginable that is your showstopper all right you can make amazing ice cream without an ice cream maker it's really easy you can use ingredients that you can get in any supermarket and the flavor is fantastic I think it's just as good as the fancy kind that you churn maybe almost as good this is really a three ingredient kind of recipe dulce de leche the cream and then the salt I think when people think of nurture and ice cream they think well it's not going to be as good because you're not churning it you're not whipping air into it it's going to be heavy it's going to be greasy but there are ways to make fluffy light creamy no Churn ice cream it's all about a few little techniques so to make this salted caramel ice cream I'm using a can of dulce de leche basically what you're trying to do is you're saving yourself the trouble of making a homemade caramel on the stove so we're going to start with that I'm going to put nine ounces of this can which is approximately two-thirds of this can into this bowl this is not an exact science this particular recipe no matter what you do it's going to be fine and I love forgiving recipes like that because this already tastes great have you ever just put this in the freezer and eaten it straight out of the freezer okay so that's about two-thirds of the can and so this I'm going to swirl in at the end and I'm just going to season this with a little bit of flaky sea salt like one or two pinches and that's the Salted part of the salted caramel you should taste the salt you should be able to taste the salt we're looking for a sweet salty balance in this recipe it's not just sweet and the salt really pulls it back from it being overly sweet so I have one and a half cups of cream also adding a pinch of salt to the cream and this is really important because the whole ice cream needs to be balanced as well so this has to be a sweet salty pop but if you don't have salt in the ice cream mix it's going to taste a little bit flat see if I can actually not splatter I have a really bad track record with handheld mixers and splattering here's what you shouldn't do don't start the mixer and plunge it in don't pull it out while it's still mixing these are all the mistakes I've made every every single mistake on camera that you can make with whipping cream and getting it all over the place I have done it so you want to beat this until you have stiff peaks and this is important because you're going to thin it out when you mix in the dulce de leche so it needs to hold its shape at this point okay so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen this this is really really thick and dense so I'm going to add a little of this so what I'm doing is I'm just lightening up the dulce de leche so that when I mix it into the whipped cream it's easier to mix in because the aim is to mix in the dulce de leche into this whipped cream until it's really well integrated and then I'm going to add The Salted stuff and that's going to be your veins of just caramel you know just those ripples that are so good I don't do this anymore but definitely when I was a teenager I would go in and eat the ripples out of all the ice creams if I drip all the caramel Ripple my parents get so mad at me see how it almost kind of looks the same in texture that way you know it's going to be easy to incorporate and so the goal here is to mix it in but not mix it so thoroughly that the whipped cream loses the air that you've beaten into it when you make a standard custard ice cream and you put it in an ice cream machine it's whipping air into the ice cream and that's how it stays buoyant and nice right with this whipped cream is our cheat whipped cream has captured the air already and we want to keep as much of that air intact so that when you put it in the freezer it still has that nice buoyancy okay now I'm going to just slowly fold it in at this point you can see it's pretty much one color but it's still fluffy like look how fluffy that is that we haven't lost the air so I'm going to put about a quarter of the cream into this salty about a quarter of this and you're just swirling it just a little bit don't even think of it as a swirl at this point you're thinking of it as you're breaking up the big blobs so that they're more integrated so you have little blobs while you're swirling if you want to do other add-ins go right ahead like you could put chopped chocolate in there like chocolate chips um toasted pecans oh my God I want everybody out there to make this and put a bunch of weird stuff in here like yummy weird ideas and just put it in the comments can you see the swirls so that's what you're looking for you know you did a good job when you see that I'm going to throw this into the freezer for about three hours or you know it'll last in there it's ice cream it'll last in there for at least a month or so when you're making a regular custard ice cream it's a lot of steps you have to cook a custard so you have to cook the eggs you have to add your cream and your milk you have to make sure it doesn't curdle then you have to add your flavorings chill it down and then put it in an ice cream maker and churn it until it's just right and it's fantastic I mean this is the ice cream you all grew up with right that custardy creamy delicious ice cream but it takes work to get there step one of salted caramel ice cream is to make the caramel so I'm turning the heat on and I'm adding three quarters of a cup of sugar you can make a dry caramel which is when you would just let this sugar melt and caramelize I find that to be riskier it's just harder to control so we're going to do a wet caramel which gives you a little more leeway and so what caramel means you add water to the sugar as it melts and that really ensures that every single little sugar crystal is completely dissolved it's harder for it to crystallize and get all grainy so just a little insurance for you I'm not going to Stir It swirling because you see what happens is sometimes little sugar crystals will get stuck on your whisk right and then when you stir it they haven't quite dissolved and then they cause a chain reaction and then you get crystallization so don't even just leave it off to the side and just swirl the worst thing that could happen to your caramel is you burn it and then you have to start again but we're not going to let that happen because we are going to watch it can you see on the side of the pan it's there's a little bit of crystallization happening I am going to take this and I'm going to put it on top and I'm going to lower the heat and I'm going to let the crystals melt so okay not as easy as opening up a can of dulce de leche that is true 100 true but at the end of the day you will have made a caramel and that's really cool I can smell that it's starting to caramelize at the edges see how I'm bringing this off the heat I'm controlling the heat if I by lifting it off I'm cooling it down a little bit and that way I can assess the color because this is bubbling like crazy like look at that bubbling like how do you even know what color it is see that I always like to say that I like to take my caramel to the color of an Irish Setter so it's like a dark red right not black not not a chocolate lab that's too dark but not a golden retriever that's too light I love comparing all of my desserts to dogs so now I've got my caramel base and I'm going to make the ice cream just right on top of this caramel this is going to flavor the entire cord of ice cream what's going to happen as it sizzles is it's going to harden because the cold cream is hitting this hot caramel it's going to harden into little bits of caramel candy which are delicious but don't eat them because you need them for your ice cream with your whisk you can feel in fact here I can pull some up for you look at that that is candy oh that's dramatic that's beautiful and that's all going to melt as we cook this with the cream so I'm just going to put this on low heat and I'm also going to add milk and I'm going to add a pinch of salt it's just a little bit to bring out the other flavors I'm going to add more salt later when we Churn it to give those salty pops and although okay so we have sugar in the caramel but we've cooked off a lot of the sweetness so we have to add more sugar to the ice cream base this looks scary you're thinking is this ever going to melt but don't be scared it is gonna melt I promise I'm going to put this on super low as low as it goes and now we're going to separate the eggs so here's the thing about making a homemade ice cream you use a lot of eggs you will have a lot of egg whites left over keep them put them in the freezer I promise you will find ways to use them Angel's food cake little almond mini cakes phenol CA there's a cocktail called a rattlesnake which is really good and it uses an egg white and I love it so I'm going to just mix these up whisk them together and then what I'm going to do is temper them and what tempering the eggs means is that I'm going to add a little of the hot cream mixture which is completely smooth at this point all of the caramel has dissolved so I'm going to add a little bit of this hot cream into the yolks and that tempersome and what that does is it brings their temperature up without cooking them and that allows us to put them back into the pot and then you don't get scrambled eggs but here's another thing we're going to strain it at the end so even if you curdle it just a little bit it's still okay and then we're just going to cook it over low heat until it thickens ever so slightly this looks like heavy cream before it looked like milk and now you can see how thick it is it looks thick and viscous like heavy cream at this point we need to let this cool completely before we even put it in the ice cream maker so I'm gonna let it cool and then I'm gonna put it in the fridge and I'm going to chill it and then you can Churn it later all right so we have our chilled caramel ice cream base I wanted to show you this is the big fancy ice cream maker this one has a refrigeration compression unit in the ice cream maker so you don't need to freeze the ball so it's expensive it's an investment it works really really well so if you love ice cream and you really want to spend extra money on something you could get yourself one of these this one works just as well it turns the ice cream beautifully the key is the bowl needs to live in your freezer it needs to be frozen solid so that it's cold enough to churn this well now you go do something else for 15 or 20 minutes and then at the very end you add your flaky sea salt and the reason you do it then is because you don't want the crystals to dissolve you want to have those pops of saltiness on your tongue so you need to make sure this is already Frozen when these go in thank you okay it's done so at this point it looks like soft serve and then we're going to put it in the freezer and we're going to let it continue to firm up until it's just perfect beautiful ice cream and then this goes straight into freezer so here we have our ice cream we have our shortcut and then we have our salted caramel custard-based show stopper oven ice cream let's first let's just do a little compare and contrast shall we let's look at the two different ice creams you can get a sense you can even see this one you can see actually that it is more compact it's denser this one is a bit lighter you can see it's a little it looks a little fluffier and that's from the whipped cream let's do the shortcut one first since that's the one that we made first I mean just imagine whipped cream frozen but not icy you know and denser it's got a fluffiness on the tongue flavor is Sweet It Is sweet it's lightly caramelly I wouldn't say it has a deep caramel flavor it has a lighter flavor but it's really Pleasant and yummy and it's just delicious if I just wanted something really easy to do I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it but I wanted something that is just you know like the pure essence of Summer I would make that in a heartbeat let's try this one I mean this one's amazing this one just tastes like oh caramel intense this has an intense caramel flavor that classic custard ice cream texture like exactly what you want in an ice cream right and now let's make sundaes for my shortcut Sunday I mean right why not it's you know it's good you can make either one you will be happy either way and that is the point of the show is that you have options and you can't go wrong shortcut or show stopper it's up to youif I'm gonna buy ice cream I go for the weird flavor I go for the flavor I've never had before wow you know I've never had saffron blueberry chocolate and so I'll go for that because I always want to try something new but if I'm gonna make ice cream and I'm gonna serve it to people I want to go for the flavor that's the simplest if you can make perfect vanilla caramel chocolate oh and strawberry too that's all you need hi I'm Melissa Clark cooking Studio to make two different kinds of ice cream today here's the thing you can make really delicious things and they don't have to be that hard they can be so easy and so simple but sometimes you really want to pull out all the stops you want a delicious best possible version of a dessert and to me I think that's really fun I'm going to make a shortcut really easy no Churn ice cream and then I'm going to make the best salted caramel custard ice cream imaginable that is your showstopper all right you can make amazing ice cream without an ice cream maker it's really easy you can use ingredients that you can get in any supermarket and the flavor is fantastic I think it's just as good as the fancy kind that you churn maybe almost as good this is really a three ingredient kind of recipe dulce de leche the cream and then the salt I think when people think of nurture and ice cream they think well it's not going to be as good because you're not churning it you're not whipping air into it it's going to be heavy it's going to be greasy but there are ways to make fluffy light creamy no Churn ice cream it's all about a few little techniques so to make this salted caramel ice cream I'm using a can of dulce de leche basically what you're trying to do is you're saving yourself the trouble of making a homemade caramel on the stove so we're going to start with that I'm going to put nine ounces of this can which is approximately two-thirds of this can into this bowl this is not an exact science this particular recipe no matter what you do it's going to be fine and I love forgiving recipes like that because this already tastes great have you ever just put this in the freezer and eaten it straight out of the freezer okay so that's about two-thirds of the can and so this I'm going to swirl in at the end and I'm just going to season this with a little bit of flaky sea salt like one or two pinches and that's the Salted part of the salted caramel you should taste the salt you should be able to taste the salt we're looking for a sweet salty balance in this recipe it's not just sweet and the salt really pulls it back from it being overly sweet so I have one and a half cups of cream also adding a pinch of salt to the cream and this is really important because the whole ice cream needs to be balanced as well so this has to be a sweet salty pop but if you don't have salt in the ice cream mix it's going to taste a little bit flat see if I can actually not splatter I have a really bad track record with handheld mixers and splattering here's what you shouldn't do don't start the mixer and plunge it in don't pull it out while it's still mixing these are all the mistakes I've made every every single mistake on camera that you can make with whipping cream and getting it all over the place I have done it so you want to beat this until you have stiff peaks and this is important because you're going to thin it out when you mix in the dulce de leche so it needs to hold its shape at this point okay so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen this this is really really thick and dense so I'm going to add a little of this so what I'm doing is I'm just lightening up the dulce de leche so that when I mix it into the whipped cream it's easier to mix in because the aim is to mix in the dulce de leche into this whipped cream until it's really well integrated and then I'm going to add The Salted stuff and that's going to be your veins of just caramel you know just those ripples that are so good I don't do this anymore but definitely when I was a teenager I would go in and eat the ripples out of all the ice creams if I drip all the caramel Ripple my parents get so mad at me see how it almost kind of looks the same in texture that way you know it's going to be easy to incorporate and so the goal here is to mix it in but not mix it so thoroughly that the whipped cream loses the air that you've beaten into it when you make a standard custard ice cream and you put it in an ice cream machine it's whipping air into the ice cream and that's how it stays buoyant and nice right with this whipped cream is our cheat whipped cream has captured the air already and we want to keep as much of that air intact so that when you put it in the freezer it still has that nice buoyancy okay now I'm going to just slowly fold it in at this point you can see it's pretty much one color but it's still fluffy like look how fluffy that is that we haven't lost the air so I'm going to put about a quarter of the cream into this salty about a quarter of this and you're just swirling it just a little bit don't even think of it as a swirl at this point you're thinking of it as you're breaking up the big blobs so that they're more integrated so you have little blobs while you're swirling if you want to do other add-ins go right ahead like you could put chopped chocolate in there like chocolate chips um toasted pecans oh my God I want everybody out there to make this and put a bunch of weird stuff in here like yummy weird ideas and just put it in the comments can you see the swirls so that's what you're looking for you know you did a good job when you see that I'm going to throw this into the freezer for about three hours or you know it'll last in there it's ice cream it'll last in there for at least a month or so when you're making a regular custard ice cream it's a lot of steps you have to cook a custard so you have to cook the eggs you have to add your cream and your milk you have to make sure it doesn't curdle then you have to add your flavorings chill it down and then put it in an ice cream maker and churn it until it's just right and it's fantastic I mean this is the ice cream you all grew up with right that custardy creamy delicious ice cream but it takes work to get there step one of salted caramel ice cream is to make the caramel so I'm turning the heat on and I'm adding three quarters of a cup of sugar you can make a dry caramel which is when you would just let this sugar melt and caramelize I find that to be riskier it's just harder to control so we're going to do a wet caramel which gives you a little more leeway and so what caramel means you add water to the sugar as it melts and that really ensures that every single little sugar crystal is completely dissolved it's harder for it to crystallize and get all grainy so just a little insurance for you I'm not going to Stir It swirling because you see what happens is sometimes little sugar crystals will get stuck on your whisk right and then when you stir it they haven't quite dissolved and then they cause a chain reaction and then you get crystallization so don't even just leave it off to the side and just swirl the worst thing that could happen to your caramel is you burn it and then you have to start again but we're not going to let that happen because we are going to watch it can you see on the side of the pan it's there's a little bit of crystallization happening I am going to take this and I'm going to put it on top and I'm going to lower the heat and I'm going to let the crystals melt so okay not as easy as opening up a can of dulce de leche that is true 100 true but at the end of the day you will have made a caramel and that's really cool I can smell that it's starting to caramelize at the edges see how I'm bringing this off the heat I'm controlling the heat if I by lifting it off I'm cooling it down a little bit and that way I can assess the color because this is bubbling like crazy like look at that bubbling like how do you even know what color it is see that I always like to say that I like to take my caramel to the color of an Irish Setter so it's like a dark red right not black not not a chocolate lab that's too dark but not a golden retriever that's too light I love comparing all of my desserts to dogs so now I've got my caramel base and I'm going to make the ice cream just right on top of this caramel this is going to flavor the entire cord of ice cream what's going to happen as it sizzles is it's going to harden because the cold cream is hitting this hot caramel it's going to harden into little bits of caramel candy which are delicious but don't eat them because you need them for your ice cream with your whisk you can feel in fact here I can pull some up for you look at that that is candy oh that's dramatic that's beautiful and that's all going to melt as we cook this with the cream so I'm just going to put this on low heat and I'm also going to add milk and I'm going to add a pinch of salt it's just a little bit to bring out the other flavors I'm going to add more salt later when we Churn it to give those salty pops and although okay so we have sugar in the caramel but we've cooked off a lot of the sweetness so we have to add more sugar to the ice cream base this looks scary you're thinking is this ever going to melt but don't be scared it is gonna melt I promise I'm going to put this on super low as low as it goes and now we're going to separate the eggs so here's the thing about making a homemade ice cream you use a lot of eggs you will have a lot of egg whites left over keep them put them in the freezer I promise you will find ways to use them Angel's food cake little almond mini cakes phenol CA there's a cocktail called a rattlesnake which is really good and it uses an egg white and I love it so I'm going to just mix these up whisk them together and then what I'm going to do is temper them and what tempering the eggs means is that I'm going to add a little of the hot cream mixture which is completely smooth at this point all of the caramel has dissolved so I'm going to add a little bit of this hot cream into the yolks and that tempersome and what that does is it brings their temperature up without cooking them and that allows us to put them back into the pot and then you don't get scrambled eggs but here's another thing we're going to strain it at the end so even if you curdle it just a little bit it's still okay and then we're just going to cook it over low heat until it thickens ever so slightly this looks like heavy cream before it looked like milk and now you can see how thick it is it looks thick and viscous like heavy cream at this point we need to let this cool completely before we even put it in the ice cream maker so I'm gonna let it cool and then I'm gonna put it in the fridge and I'm going to chill it and then you can Churn it later all right so we have our chilled caramel ice cream base I wanted to show you this is the big fancy ice cream maker this one has a refrigeration compression unit in the ice cream maker so you don't need to freeze the ball so it's expensive it's an investment it works really really well so if you love ice cream and you really want to spend extra money on something you could get yourself one of these this one works just as well it turns the ice cream beautifully the key is the bowl needs to live in your freezer it needs to be frozen solid so that it's cold enough to churn this well now you go do something else for 15 or 20 minutes and then at the very end you add your flaky sea salt and the reason you do it then is because you don't want the crystals to dissolve you want to have those pops of saltiness on your tongue so you need to make sure this is already Frozen when these go in thank you okay it's done so at this point it looks like soft serve and then we're going to put it in the freezer and we're going to let it continue to firm up until it's just perfect beautiful ice cream and then this goes straight into freezer so here we have our ice cream we have our shortcut and then we have our salted caramel custard-based show stopper oven ice cream let's first let's just do a little compare and contrast shall we let's look at the two different ice creams you can get a sense you can even see this one you can see actually that it is more compact it's denser this one is a bit lighter you can see it's a little it looks a little fluffier and that's from the whipped cream let's do the shortcut one first since that's the one that we made first I mean just imagine whipped cream frozen but not icy you know and denser it's got a fluffiness on the tongue flavor is Sweet It Is sweet it's lightly caramelly I wouldn't say it has a deep caramel flavor it has a lighter flavor but it's really Pleasant and yummy and it's just delicious if I just wanted something really easy to do I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it but I wanted something that is just you know like the pure essence of Summer I would make that in a heartbeat let's try this one I mean this one's amazing this one just tastes like oh caramel intense this has an intense caramel flavor that classic custard ice cream texture like exactly what you want in an ice cream right and now let's make sundaes for my shortcut Sunday I mean right why not it's you know it's good you can make either one you will be happy either way and that is the point of the show is that you have options and you can't go wrong shortcut or show stopper it's up to you\n"