When Home-Made Ice Cream Had Raw Egg Whites
It’s the dog days of summer and it seems like no-churn ice cream is everywhere online. It’s on blogs, online newspapers, and social media. No-churn ice cream has been around for a long time, but in recent years people have been using condensed milk as a way of keeping the ice cream scoopable and its texture smooth.
If you know nothing about the process of making ice cream, let me explain it to you. It’s not as easy as just freezing cream, like the name implies. If you do that, what you end up with is a brick of frozen dairy, impossible to scoop. Who wants a trip to the dentist for a cracked tooth? Instead, air needs to be incorporated into the mixture somehow before freezing, and there needs to be a mechanical or chemical way to prevent large ice crystals. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to use an ice cream machine, also known as a churner. The machine freezes the mixture to a soft-serve consistency while continuously whipping air into it as it churns. Since it freezes the mixture fairly quickly, it produces a smooth final product with small ice crystals. Then, and only then, can you put the partially frozen ice cream in the freezer. If your recipe is balanced, you will end up with a frozen but still scoopable product. Sure, it gets pretty hard in a home freezer, you just need to leave it out for about fifteen minutes to soften up a bit before scooping.
These machines are not expensive, but for people who don’t make enough ice cream, or just don’t want to buy another kitchen appliance, no-churn ice cream is the next best thing. But “no-churn” is a bit misleading because you DO do some churning, you just do it while mixing ingredients rather than as a separate step. No-churn ice cream relies on the cook whipping ingredients like heavy cream to stiff peaks, then folding the rest of the ingredients in, lightening the mixture in the process. It can also rely on high amounts of sugar and fat in addition to whipping.
This is where condensed milk is a bit of a miracle. Condensed milk has so much sugar that, when combined with the whipped heavy cream, it pretty much ensures that the ice cream will not freeze into consistency that requires a pick axe to break. The sugar lowers the freezing point of the mixture, ensuring that it stays creamy and not frozen solid.
But before people started using condensed milk in no-churn ice cream, they used whipped egg whites to achieve the same end, albeit with less sugar. Yes, raw egg whites. The world hasn’t always been worried about salmonella.