On Saturday night, I had to try out the Ice Cream maker that I bought at a yard sale in Albany. It's been a long time since I've made ice cream. We might have done it once or twice when I was growing up. We used one of those old fashioned hand cranked wooden bucket jobbies. This thing I bought is a little more high tech, but the idea is the same. You mix the ingredients together in the "creamer", surround it with alternating layers of ice and salt and turn it on. Pretty basic stuff. The devil, however, is in the details, specifically here in 1) the recipe for the ice cream, 2) the ratio of salt to ice in the machine and 3) having enough ice on hand to keep the cream cold enough to freeze. I'll get back to all three of these.

I decided for the first time out I would go rather simple, to make the "easy chocolate ice cream" recipe that came in the instruction manual (with the minor addition of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter cups). The recipe calls for 2 cups of half and half, a half cup of cocoa powder (Ghirardelli), a cup and a half of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla extract and two cups of whipping cream. Simple enough. I gathered the ingredients, mixed them together in the blender, poured it into the creamer, put the creamer in the machine, placed the blade inside the creamer, capped on the top, layered the ice and salt and ice around the outside and flipped the switch. According to the instructions, in 18-25 minutes I would have ice cream. 90 minutes later the blade was swirling around in a soupy chocolate like mixture.

Was it cold? Yes. Did it taste alright? More or less. Was it ice cream? Not so much.

I added some more ice around the outside. Added more salt and let it go a for little while longer, up to the point that I ran out of ice, which didn't take very long. I gave up, stopped the machine and put the creamer in the freezer hoping it would harden to the right consistency overnight. It did not. What I had was soft freeze peanut butter cup chocolate ice cream. Good, but not what I was looking for.

I have an idea of what went wrong, but I'm not sure. I go back to the 3 details that I mentioned earlier. I think the recipe was ok, although I won't add as much sugar next time because the mixture was slightly too sweet for my taste and I might cut back on the vanilla, just a smidgen. The ratio of salt to ice is still something of a mystery me. I was lit major, but I do understand something about heat (or in this case cold) exchange from my Introduction to Phsycial Science class in 8th grade (thank you Dr. Cook). I know that the salt is there essentially as a catalyst for this reaction. Unless I'm completely off-base (and I'm not discounting the possibility) the salt melts the ice and forces a heat exchange between the ice and the creamer. The ice melts (gets warmer) while the creamer freezes (gets colder). The more salt, the faster the reaction and the exchange of heat. It's possible that I didn't have enough salt. Probably really. Then there's the last point, not having enough ice on hand. The recipe said you'd need 6 trays of ice and they weren't kidding. I had about 4. If my theory is right and I had used enough salt, the ice would have melted faster, the mixture in the creamer would have frozen, but only if I had replaced the melting ice with fresh layers of ice and salt. Any scientists out there want to comment on this theory?

I'm probably going to try to perfect the chocolate ice cream before I branch out to other flavors (cookie dough). It's easy enough to find recipes on the internet, but if anyone has any experience with this and wants to share, I'm all ears.