(Title should be sung, as so:)

I bought an ice cream maker on a whim a month or so ago — I had been reading the tumblrs I follow and someone had posted a picture of strawberry ice cream with the note “I think this means I need to get myself an ice cream maker” and I thought to myself, “How much do ice cream makers go for, anyway?” And I Googled and found one for a lot less than I’d been expecting, and marked down to boot. I took it as a sign and I bought it. I now count it as one of the best impulse buys I’ve ever made. Three words: EMERGENCY ICE CREAM. You know those days or nights when something happens and you either need to celebrate or wallow? (It is a testimony to ice cream’s greatness that it can be used in both situations. What else can? Alcohol. Alcohol and ice cream — all I need in life.) And you might not have ice cream in your freezer because you’re trying to be “good” about what you eat? Whip out the ice cream maker and in 30 minutes you’ll have delicious preservative-free ice cream. Provided you have the necessary ingredients: cream, milk, sugar, vanilla. So you’ll need to, like, prepare for emergency ice cream. It will be worth it.

I’ve always had a weakness for ice cream, plain old vanilla or loaded up Ben and Jerry’s style. As a kid one of my favorite times of the year was when the Dairy Queens opened for summer — that first soft-serve cone was such a treat. Here in Fort Greene I believe the season will be marked not by the reappearance of Mr. Softee (who’s been cruising around since early March for some reason) but by the reinstatement of the General Greene Ice Cream Cart, which serves Philadelphia-style ice cream (no eggs or cooking) in a variety of wonderful flavors. It is surprisingly rich and complex for so few ingredients.

I do have a favorite kind of ice cream: salted caramel. The best I’ve ever had was in San Francisco at The Bi-Rite Creamery — so smooth and custardy and with large salt crystals right in it to balance the caramel’s sweetness. (The Bi-Rite is also where I picked up my “Good to the last lick” t-shirt, to date the wink-wink-nudge-nudgiest shirt I own). I have a much more pronounced salt tooth than sweet tooth, and sweet + salt is just about the best thing ever. I have dipped french fries into chocolate malts, and have sprinkled a bit of salt on ice cream like Grandpa Gene does in that one episode of Mad Men. It’s important to get the balance just right, and salted caramel ice cream does that.

So I knew that sooner rather than later I would attempt to make my own salted caramel ice cream. I found a couple recipes — one from David Lebovitz, author of The Perfect Scoop and therefore the leading ice cream making expert, and one from epicurious.com, which is a utilitarian source for recipes of all kinds. After reviewing them both I opted to go with the epicurious recipe as it seemed less complicated and fiddly.

I will apologize now for not having a lot of photos of this process, but I wasn’t initially planning on writing about this. Also, this isn’t a food blog. But I’m sure to make this ice cream again and will see what I can do about documenting the steps.

The first thing I had to do was melt sugar in a skillet. This was more fun than I thought it would be, and it took longer than I expected, probably because I wasn’t melting the sugar IN anything. You just pour the sugar into a skillet and turn on the gas and stir it around until it liquifies, which all of a sudden it does — I was worrying at the way my sugar was still dry and unmelty when I noticed that there was a small pool of light amber expanding from the center of my skillet. COOL.

Once the melted sugar looked dark amber enough, I added the cream. The note that the “mixture will splatter” when adding the cream to the melted sugar was helpful, but equally helpful would have been a note saying the melted sugar will instantly harden and stick to your stirring implement because THIS is caramel and this is what caramel DOES. As it was I had a moment of “fuck I am doing this WRONG” until I realized that the hardened caramel was melting in the heating cream. So I let it cook, and it bubbled cheerfully, and then I was mightily pleased with myself because I had MADE MY OWN CARAMEL.

I live for these little triumphant I MADE THIS moments, even if they follow on the heels of “that was a lot easier than I thought it would be” moments.

The custard proved to be a little trickier. I was heating the milk/cream/sugar on low as I whisked the eggs together, concerned that I would cook the liquid too much. Pouring half of that liquid in a “slow steady stream” while continuing to whisk was when I wished I had an extra hand. I wasn’t able to get a slow steady stream as it was — the heated milk and cream just sort of gurgled its way into the eggs in blubs and spurts. I don’t think that was too much of an issue. I do think once I poured that into the main saucepan I cooked it for a little too long, because I found a couple solid custardy pieces as I poured in the cooled caramel. Would having a thermometer have prevented that? Not sure.

The most difficult part of the whole process was leaving the bowl of salted caramel custard in the fridge for 3-6 hours to cool down. I diligently stirred as I was instructed to, but couldn’t help tasting the spoon after each trip to the fridge. I went through a lot of spoons that night.

I wound up added a 1/4 (or maybe 1/2) teaspoon of kosher salt to the mix just before it stopped churning in the ice cream maker, and it was just the right amount of salt to balance the caramel. I wish I had a picture of the finished ice cream, but as you might expect, it’s all gone now.

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