This is vanilla here, made with one Tahitian bean and some extract. This was take two of my vanilla attempts, where I actually didn't curdle the eggs. My very first time, I ended up curdling the eggs somewhat. That batch had two Madagascan vanilla beans. I saved that first batch anyway and it ended up tasting way better than this one, after salvaging the curdled texture with the hand blender. The Madagascan vanilla bean ice cream (not pictured) had a lot more lovely specks from the two vanilla beans than this one. I loved scraping those seeds! I plan to throw the used pods in my agave nectar to make vanilla agave, and also into my container of powdered milk, to make vanilla milk! (I don't have a jar of sugar or else I might have just done the whole vanilla sugar thing.)
I will say it was quite challenging to get a smooth texture without the machine. I tried the stir-every-thirty-minutes method but it still ended up somewhat icy. Oh well. The photo in that link looks about as icy as mine so I guess that's as good as I'll be able to get.
Recipe wise, I opted for using the whole egg rather than (1) foregoing the egg or (2) just using egg yolks. Why, you ask? Well my two favorite storebought vanilla bean brands are Haagen Dazs and Green & Blacks. They both use eggs, and the latter actually uses the whole egg. So there, you ice cream yolk-only snobs! What else...? A bunch of recipes suggest a 2:1 ratio of heavy cream to milk, but I went for a 1:1 ratio (whole milk) and it turned out fine! Half a cup of sugar (brown) for my 1 cup cream and 1 cup milk... 3 whole eggs. You bring the milk to a simmer with the vanilla seeds infusing in there. Then you pour the milk into the egg/sugar mixture so that the milk can sort of cook it, and you keep mixing the custard until it becomes slightly thick. Then you pour that into the cream and basically let it cool for a few hours or overnight, then commence the freezing process.
Yay!
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