Tonight, I finally got around to trying out my "new" Ice Cream Machine (soft serve), having originally bought it over 1-2 years ago (i.e. it was on sale during a long weekend, and I'd always wanted a soft-serve machine).
Why then has it taken so long to get around to trying it? Well, mostly being too busy to read the instructions to:
1) set it up,
2) get the ingredients,
3) have enough time to set it all up and finally try it
This Easter weekend, I *almost* managed to do that, until I found that we didn't have Vanilla Essence (as called for by the recipe), having thought we did... Oh well! That was one of the "things not going well" that happened that weekend...
Anyway, tonight was the night, when I finally got to see how well this worked (and/or whether I could say that it's potentially a better system than what two of my colleagues have using a different / newer machine they got at the end of last year). (Well, on that front, I can say - yes, their one apparently is *really* noisy as it has to grind into solid-frozen ice, whereas mine churns liquids into semi-solids using a frozen bowl)...
Verdict: All in all, I consider it a "moderate success"! 🍦
The texture was what I'd call "airy" soft serve, but with a hint of "lumpy flour-iness". The flavor was a bit on the mild side (having gone a bit easy on the sugar + vanilla essence).
Learnings:
* The last dregs will be hard to get out, as they rapidly freeze on the chill bowl, heading rapidly towards the "hardened freezer icecream" consistency (and being a bit hard to scrape back off)... so *that* is why they say you can't reuse the bowl immediately for a new batch! 😅
The really big downside is needing to freeze the bowl for 24 hrs first, as it is the same size as a tub of ready-to-eat ice cream! 🤣
* I may want to look at my prep technique for the mixture, as it felt a little lumpy / flour-ey - Dunno if it was from too much cream into the milk at once, not shaking up the cream enough to blend the fat back in, or not mixing up the mixture well enough.
* Maybe a little bit more sugar + flavoring wouldn't hurt next time... I was probably like a "smidge" off (like a few extra spoons of sugar, and maybe 1/3rd spoon more vanilla I reckon?)
* Be better prepared to not get all the benches and hands and everything else sticky 🤣
* Oh, and yeah: Definitely need to remember to open that nozzle again before trying to clean it! We had a good chicken-nugget sized chunk stuck in there after washing, that kept dissolve-leeching out into the sink until we remembered to open it and flushed it out from there! 😜
* With the recipe from the book, I got 3 cones, one jam jar, and a 2-3 extra scoops out of just over half the mixture. Still have another cup or so of extra mixture in the fridge that I didn't put in today, not knowing how much it would make, and figuring having extra for another day would be good
Next Steps:
Try this again, maybe with some tweaks to the mixture...
Then start looking into other recipes (including a chocolate one, or maybe making some of Mum's favourite black-sesame ice cream...) hmm... 😋
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