I think it was two years ago (right, not last summer?) that the Sunday Slow Cooks decided to make their way through Dave Lebovitz’s book, The Perfect Scoop. Since then I’ve spent some time making other recipes of his, as well as experimenting a little too.

Sammi’s been hocking me to make ice cream for her (I made three batches last week, but brought them to a friend, so I promised to make some this week with her), and since I had milk chocolate in the house, I opted for this flavor.

You should know a few things.

1) His ice creams are for the most part way fattening. He justifies the eating of these by limiting yourself to one perfect scoop. But even with that, I still found many of them overpoweringly rich in that I could feel the fat on my tongue. So as I’ve been making them recently, I’ve been swapping the milk proportion with the cream proportion. Or reducing in some other fashion. They are still in no way low fat, but at least my tongue doesn’t feel coated with fat when I eat them.

2) For this flavor, he suggests using good milk chocolate, that has at least 30% cocoa. The first time I made this, I found some organic chocolate that did specify how much cocoa, percentage-wise, the bar contained. The second time, I had Lindt chocolate that does not specify, and that’s what I used.
3) His recipe calls for 8 ounces of chocolate. The bars I had were 3.5 ounces and I only had two. Using a total of 7 ounces of chocolate didn’t seem to affect the recipe at all.

Milk Chocolate Ice Cream

7 ounces good milk chocolate, chopped fine
1 cup cream (he uses 1.5 cups)
2 cup whole milk (he uses 1.5 cups)
3/4 cup sugar (I used a scad less and might consider reducing it a bit more)
1 big pinch of salt
4 egg yolks
2 t cognac (I used it the first time, and didn’t use it the second time – do what you like).

Melt the chocolate in the cream in a heat-proof bowl over simmering water (I used the top of a double boiler). Set aside with a sieve over the top (I scraped my mixture into a bowl and then put the sieve over the top).

Beat the egg yolks in a medium bowl.

Heat the milk, sugar and salt in a medium sauce pan. When warm (not boiling), slowly add this to the egg yolks, stirring with a whisk as you go (if working alone, wrap a dish towel and base of bowl that holds the yolks, so it doesn’t spin). Return yolk-milk mixture back to pot and warm on stove until it thickens, stirring constantly with a heat-proof spatula or in my case a wooden spoon, scraping the bottom. The mixture is done when it coats the back of spoon/spatula and you can trail a finger through it and the pathway remains (the more ice cream you make, the better you’ll get at figuring out when it’s done).

Pour the custard (aka egg-milk mixture) through sieve into bowl with chocolate mix. Put bowl in ice bath (I actually do this ahead of time, so it’s already there when I add the custard), and stir to cool, adding cognac if you want. Pour into a container and put in fridge to chill thoroughly (I like to chill mine over night).
Put mixture in ice cream maker, following manufacturer’s directions.

Oh, and if you can get 16 “perfect scoops” out of it – they’re five points each. I’m going to try this as ice milk soon – that should knock it down some but of course, it won’t be as creamy.