One day it occurred to us that ice cream makers exist, yet we keep spending tons of money on ever shrinking cartons at the grocery store. Frankly, that’s some absurd behavior. We decided to end it, or at least drastically cut back. From now on, you can consider us official dabblers in the homemade ice cream hobby. These are the best easy ice cream recipes you can follow at home.
Also, if you don’t feel like shelling out for an ice cream maker, you can build one yourself. It’s a good project to occupy an afternoon, and you’re rewarded with ice cream. Who loses there?
Vanilla
Making a good vanilla ice cream is the first step in making good ice cream at all. The flavor’s an old standby, it’s generally popular, and you should really get a good handle on it before moving on to more complicated flavors. You’ll also find that a lot of ice cream recipes require a vanilla base, or your most successful flavor experiments started when you decided to make a few personal changes to your vanilla recipe. Get good at this one and you’ll be good at everything you put into your ice cream churner. Recipe
Huckleberry Ice Cream
If you told us a huckleberry was a completely made up fruit to fool people who liked Mark Twain too much, we’d believe you. It doesn’t particularly matter to us and that’s the kind of long term prank Twain himself would approve of. We learned all we needed to about it from this ice cream anyway. The color is the kind of appetizing you find in an artisanal ice cream shops where they get weird with obscure flavors. Which is kind of what you’re doing here. Huckleberries are really common in certain areas, but other people might only encounter them in highly specific settings. Like a hipster shop or their own kitchen. Recipe
Rocky Road
Sloth and Chunk from The Goonies aren’t going to steer you wrong. Rocky Road is a great flavor and having the ability to provide it for yourself is a dangerous prospect. This is also one of the more time intensive recipes on the list. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, but it’s not something you can throw together for a party in two hours. You’ll need a morning’s worth of waiting time if you’re planning on serving it in the same day. Recipe
Brown-Sugar Bourbon
Obviously there’s going to be bourbon on this list. We wouldn’t be able to put it together without our favorite American spirit. You even get to pick your expression. We’d recommend something on the corn heavy/sweeter side. It’s not super strong on the bourbon, though you can change that pretty easily. Just put more in. You might mess with how well the ice cream freezes, but we’re not too worried about it, so why should you be? Recipe
Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream
Peanut butter cups by themselves are delicious, which makes it amazing how much better they get once you put them in ice cream. It’s a classic flavor and being able to make it at home is almost a dessert themed magic trick. From now on, our houses will be constantly stocked with peanut butter cups and no one will go hungry after they already didn’t go hungry at dinner. We’ll buy so many peanut butter cups, they’ll have to induct us as shareholders in Reese’s. Recipe
Espresso Chocolate Chip
Coffee ice cream is a weird dessert to us. You’re making the very last thing you eat in a day the same thing as the very first thing you drank. There aren’t many things like that, unless you make a habit out of chocolate chip pancakes. Yet coffee ice cream, and its many variants, is one of the most delicious kinds of ice cream. An espresso ice cream makes the flavors here pretty strong, but we’re not opposed to that. And you can add or subtract as much of it as you want. Recipe
5 Minute Ice Cream
Every other recipe here requires an ice cream maker, whether that’s the handmade one we linked to in the intro or a machine you forgot you got as a gift a few years ago. You’ll usually get the best results from one of those, so stick with them. But if you ever find yourself short on time, willpower, or patience, or simply want to try something different, the only equipment required by this recipe is two Ziploc bags. When you have those, toss the ingredients together and get shaking. You’ll have ice cream only a few minutes later. Recipe
