Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream

Make Ice Cream at Home!

Making ice cream at home is actually pretty easy to do and you don’t need any fancy equipment if you’re just making small batches for fun!

Ingredients you need to make your own Ice Cream

1 part milk (whole milk or 2% work best)
2 parts heavy cream (optional)
Dash of vanilla
1 part sugar
4 cups crushed ice
4 tablespoons salt
2 quart size plastic bags
1 gallon size plastic freezer bag
Hand towel or gloves to keep fingers from freezing

Directions

Begin with mixing the milk, vanilla and sugar together in one of the quart size bags. If you want, you can mix this in a bowl first so that you get all the sugar dissolved. Seal the bag tightly. You want to try to get as much of the air out of the bag as you can. Too much air left inside may force the bag to open during the mixing stage.

Place this bag inside the other quart size bag, again leaving as little air inside as possible and sealing well. By double-bagging, the risk of salt and ice leaking into the ice cream is minimized.

Put the two bags inside the gallon size bag and fill the gallon sized bag with ice, then sprinkle a generous amount of salt on top. Again, squeeze out as much air as possible and then seal the bag. Wrap the bag in the towel, or put your gloves on, and shake and knead the bag, making sure the ice surrounds the creamy mixture. Five to eight minutes should be enough time to allow the mixture to freeze into ice cream.

When you are all done carefully open the bags and extract your ice cream. Enjoy!
If you’d like to experiment a bit more you can try substituting a mixture of heavy cream and your choice of milk. Mix up a few different batches and compare the texture of ice cream. Which do you think will have a smoother texture?

We suggest using freezer bags because they are thicker and less likely to develop small holes, allowing the bags to leak. You can get away with using regular plastic bags for the smaller quart sizes, because you are double-bagging. If you plan to do this indoors, we strongly recommend using gallon size freezer bags.

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