Hey everyone! Welcome back to Le Gourmet TV. Today we are going to continue our look at ice cream recipes. Now, we have already done a couple of no cook ice cream recipes here on the site, and those are the sorts of recipes that you can start making it and 45 minutes later you can have ice cream in your bowl, that is better than probably 95% of what you can get at the grocery store.

Today we are going to do a cooked ice cream, which kind of gets you that next 5%. Nothing comes for free, and what this costs you is time. We are going to cook it today, it has to cool down, and then go into the fridge to be chilled overnight before you can actually freeze the ice cream. So it does add a lot of time. You have to think ahead a little bit more. But what you are going to gain here is improved texture and flavour.

We just start off. We put regular old milk; this is 2%, into a pot, and half a vanilla pod that I have slit kind of lengthwise. Put that in, and on, I would say, medium heat, we just want to bring this up to temperature. You don't want to boil it, you just kind of want to bring it up, warm it up, and get it just below that scalding temperature. Keep an eye on it, because you don't want it to burn.

So while that's coming up to temperature, we will get the next couple of ingredients ready. I have got three eggs and about three quarters of a cup of sugar. We are just going to whisk that together. Just want to break up the eggs and incorporate the sugar.

So the milk is up to temperature, and we will just pull the vanilla bean out and sit it aside, because we are going to scrape out all of the insides of the vanilla bean and add it back into the ice cream and just discard the pod.

So now what you want to do is add this hot milk into the egg and sugar mixture. You just can't pour it all in at once, everybody knows you have got it tempered, so you have got to pour the milk in very slowly, just to bring the eggs up to temperature, so you are not cooking them. Little bit at a time. Really make sure that you are whisking.

Then you can start to add just a little bit faster. So now we are going to put the egg and the milk mixture back in our pan. For those of you following along at home, this is basically a custard. We are going to put this back on the heat, probably again medium, and at this point you have got to continue whisking constantly. What you want to do is cook it for about ten minutes, until it starts to thicken. You are going to notice when it's thickened.

So our mixture has thickened, and it kind of happens just like that. So I am going to turn the heat off, and then I have got two cups of whipping cream, which here, where I live is, 35% fat, and we are just going to slowly pour that into our custard mixture, whisking it in.

The next ingredient is time. So what I am going to allow this to do is cool down to room temperature, and then I am going to pour it into a pitcher, and put that pitcher in the fridge overnight, and chill it right down, and then tomorrow we will pour it into our stand mixer and we will make it into ice cream.

Okay. So we are all setup and we are ready to start our ice cream. I will just get it from the back of the fridge; its been in the fridge overnight. The first thing you want to do is you want to assemble your stand mixer, and we want to turn it on the lowest setting, which is number one on this model, but you want to start it before you pour the mixture in, that way your dasher won't get stuck to the side of the bowl.

So for the next 20 minutes or so you are just going to let this go, and it's going to churn into a nice hard ice cream.

So we have reached the end. We now have in our freezer bowl the best vanilla ice cream you are ever going to have in your entire life. I pretty much guarantee that. So what you want to do is now get it out and put it into an airtight container and into your freezer, for probably an hour, hour-and-a-half, two hours, for it to be at its peak, it should be a little bit harder.

But remember, you never want to use a metal utensil inside one of these freezer bowls, always use a silicon spatula or a wooden spoon.

So this is beautifully aerated, starting out with that cooked base is really what does the trick. The texture is incredible.

And there it is, cooked custard vanilla ice cream, with little flecks of vanilla bean in it. This takes you into the top percentile of ice cream.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you again soon.
French vanilla cooked custard ice cream recipe video