Sunday, April 11, 2010

Chocolate Chunk Vanilla Ice Cream


There use to be this great vanilla ice cream with long thin sticks of dark chocolate mixed in that I used to get from Jewel-Osco. The ice cream was super creamy and you could hear the sticks of chocolate crack as you dragged the scooper through the 1/2 gallon. While the vanilla ice cream and the chocolate pieces were both very apparent in the ice cream, neither one over powered the other. Since there are no longer any Jewel-Osco stores in Wisconsin, and since I was craving this ice cream, I decided to try to re-create it.


I started out with a simple vanilla ice cream recipe from Cook's Illustrated. While I can't post that recipe, this Alton Brown recipe would make a good substitute. While the ice cream churned in the machine, I cut up dark chocolate Dove squares roughly because I wanted chunks of chocolate throughout the ice cream. Then when the ice cream was close to finishing, I added the chocolate pieces and then transferred the whole mixture into a container for further hardening in the freezer.


While the ice cream was good, it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. It was creamy, but almost too vanilla-y, if that's such a problem. And the Dove chocolate almost stood out too much against the ice cream. So it's back to the drawing board on this one. I'm sure we won't mind the "mistakes" along the way either.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I also had the same problem when I tried making vanilla ice cream - it was too vanilla-y, and mind kind of tasted more like really cold whipped cream than ice cream. I might just stick to making other flavors of ice cream from scratch!

Margie said...

I grew up shopping at the Jewel in Chicago. Really liked the one in Racine while it lasted. I liked their small cups of vanilla and fudge ripple ice cream. I'm always doubling or tripling the amount of vanilla in recipes, so your vanilla-y ice cream sounds terrific. Looks delicious in the photos!

Amanda said...

Oooo yum! That looks really good :)