“We’re an ice cream family year-round, but especially in the summer,” Garner wrote in the Instagram video’s caption. “Ina [Garten] has a home run, can’t-miss, absolutely DELICIOUS milk chocolate sandwich cookie ice cream (the recipe is from everyone’s favorite, Modern Comfort Food), but just for funsies, we decided to make two and found another winner: Balsamic Vinegar (in ice cream! I know, crazy).
In the video, she shows how she can prepare both using the Ice Cream Maker Attachment on her KitchenAid stand mixer. While this may be a less common use for the mixer than, say, prepping cake batter, what makes it extra noteworthy is that as long as the attachment—an insulated bowl, essentially—is frozen, you can whip up ice cream in less than an hour, as Garner demonstrates.
The ice creams she makes in the video are sort of hybrids between Ina’s and Julie Van Rosendaal’s (of @dinnerwithjulie) recipes. “I got fancy and science-y and made a combined base for two ice creams in this episode,” Garner continued. “Ina’s base recipe doesn’t use brown sugar as written. Forgive me, darling Barefoot.”
It appears Ina didn’t mind, considering she commented “Save some for me!!!! Love you!!!”
When she starts working on the ice creams, she first tastes and chops what appear to be milk and dark chocolate bars. She then melts them in a double boiler with cream. Next, she separates egg yolks into a bowl for the ice cream’s custard base, along with brown sugar and a few other pantry staples.
Ask she whisks the brown sugar base, she says, “When I think about my grandmother on the farm in Oklahoma, she made homemade biscuits every morning, she made homemade cornbread every night, she cooked every single meal for all of them on this middle-of-nowhere farm, and all she had was her strong arm. Whether I complained about kneading or whisking anything by hand as a kid, my mom would always say, ‘your grandmother…!’”
She then combines the dairy and egg mixtures, refrigerates it and gets started on the balsamic vinegar syrup. “We’re so avant-garde,” she jokes, as she stirs it into a reduction.
Finally, she adds the chocolate ice cream base to the stand mixer with the frozen attachment and churns the mixture with ease, then repeats the process with the balsamic. “The brown sugar base gives it depth,” she says as she tastes some.
While the prep for the ice cream certainly pushes the total recipe time beyond 30 minutes, it is pretty cool to watch the stand mixer work its magic in a fraction of the usual churn time. Get the full recipe (which you can use with any ice cream maker) here.
