Category Archives: Ice Cream

About three years ago, Mike had an incredible watermelon sorbet at Charles Nob Hill. One of my motivators in getting an ice-cream maker was to be able to make it for him. Today I finally try but my attempt wasn’t very successful. He says the taste is fine but it doesn’t have the melt-in-your-mouth consistency sorbet should have. We suspect the problem is that the watermelon wasn’t pureed enough (I used a food processor). Next time I think I will use the blender and then strain it (so that I end up with watermelon juice) before making it.
Here is the recipe I tried
-5 cups watermelon puree (about 1/2 a seedless watermelon)
-1 cup sugar
-1/2 cup fresh lime juice
Heat 1 cup of watermelon puree with the cup of sugar and stir until the sugar melts. Mix in the rest of the puree and the lime juice. Cool in the refrigerator or freezer. Put in the ice cream machine and freeze according to the instructions.

My second batch of dulce de leche ice cream was more sucessful. This time I used 1 cup of cream, 1 cup of 2% milk, 1 cup of dulce de leche and 4 egg yolks, milk/cream and eggs were cooked separately and then all mixed together, strained, allowed to cool and frozen. I still don’t understand what the purpose of cooking is, however.
The taste of this batch was stronger (it had a greater proportion of dulce de leche) and I thought it was just as smooth. Kathy liked the first batch better, but Mike and I preferred this one.
I’m now making my 3rd batch. I used 1 cup cream, 1 1/2 cup nonfat milk (all left at home), and probably 1 1/2 cup dulce de leche. The truth is I didn’t measure it, I just keep adding it until it was very sweet. I wanted to add eggs as well, but I overcooked them so I’m not sure how much egg were left in the mix after I strained it. We’ll see how it turns out. I’ve also runned out of chocolate, so this will be plained dulce de leche, not dulce de leche granizado like my last two batches.

We love dulce de leche ice cream. Real dulce de leche ice cream, that made with dulce de leche itself, not the vanilla ice cream with caramel swirls which Haagen Daz tries to pass on as dulce de leche ice cream. Unfortunately, the real stuff is not easy to get.
There is an Argentine ice cream store, Tango Gelato, in San Francisco (they used to be in Fruitvale but they moved!) and their version is pretty good though not as delicious as the stuff in Argentina. Of course, given how different milk tastes in the US I know it’d be impossible to make the real thing, but I’d like to approximate it.
So my new project consits in trying different recipes until I find one I really like. I started with a very simple one – Ben & Jerry’s sweet cream recipe substituting dulce de leche ice cream for some of the cream. Didn’t work well. It doesn’t taste enough like dulce de leche, which doesn’t surprise me as it’s very heavy in cream. Supposedly, cream dulls the taste buds.
Tomorrow I’ll try something else.
Meanwhile, here is the recipe for this one:
Dulce de Leche Granizado
-2 eggs
-1/3 cup sugar
-2 cups cream
-1 cup milk
-1 cup dulce de leche
-1/2 cup shredded dark chocolate
Whisk eggs until fluffy, whisk in the sugar until disolved, whisk in cream and milk. In a separate bowl, whisk dulce de leche with 1 cup of the cream mixture until well blended. Add dulce de leche mixture to milk mixture. Freeze according to manufacturers instructions. Two minutes before it’s done add the shredded chocolate. Put in a sealed container and freeze until it hardens.