French Vanilla Ice Cream

For some reason, we're suddenly getting lots and lots of milk from Brownie.  I have quite a few cheeses curing, several bottles in the freezer for when we dry her off (and I'm gradually adding to this, but not wanting to fill up the freezer just yet when we have 8 animals getting slaughtered for the freezer this week) and every available jug is full.

It occurred to me this morning that I have plenty of eggs and lots of milk and one of the best things I can do with the two together is make custard.  I remembered seeing someone on My Kitchen Rules making an ice cream that was essentially a frozen creme anglaise.  I found a recipe in one of my books for creme anglaise just recently and was surprised to discover that it was simply a custard sauce with no cornflour.

A few minutes spent on google this morning, showed me that creme anglaise ice cream is better known as french vanilla - my favourite flavour of ice cream!  Well, that made it an obvious choice to be making.  I also checked up on making ice cream without an ice cream machine.  It was pretty much as I expected, you just need to pull it out of the freezer every half an hour or so and beat it up again.

The reason for this is the size of the ice crystals that form.  If I just put it straight into the freezer as it was, there would be fairly large ice crystals.  They don't change the flavour of the ice cream, but they do affect the mouth feel of it.  Beating it while it's freezing breaks up those large ice crystals and gives a smoother texture.

Thanks to Nigella, I know that after separating my eggs, I can freeze the egg whites and they'll be fine for pavlova or meringues.  So I place the egg whites in ziplock bags - 6 egg whites in each bag (which is the quantity I tend to use when I make pavlova) and there is no waste.

I have seen recipes that talked about adding the scalded milk tablespoon by tablespoon to temper the eggs.  In my first attempt, I just poured it all in and it came out fine.  

The original recipe was for 1/4 of the amount I have made, but I didn't think it was worth making ice cream 500ml at a time.  This came to approx 3 litres, possibly more.

2 containers of Creme Anglaise for French Vanilla Ice Cream

Creme Anglaise

2 litres of scalded milk
24 egg yolks
3 Cups of sugar
1 tsp of vanilla essence

Whisk egg yolks and sugar together until thick and pale.
Slowly add scalded milk, stirring constantly.
Heat on double boiler, still stirring constantly until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Remove from heat and stir in vanilla essence.

In my case, since I'm making this into ice cream, I let it cool, poured it into ice cream containers and put them in the freezer.  They'll be getting stirred every half an hour until completely frozen.

Yummy.

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