Quick fixes for almost home-made ice cream

Sometimes, you simply do not have the time, the energy or the necessary ingredients to make “proper” ice cream. If so, please consider some “quick fixes” that will allow you to “make”  ice cream anyway.

* Use commercial ice cream as ready-made base; add your own flavouring/mix-ins

Buy the best premium ice cream available (vanilla usually being the preferred, most versatile flavour), let the package soften a bit and then stir in your own preferred flavouring.  Return the ice cream to the freezer and later present the outcome as “your own” creation. This half-fabricated method works particularly well with more solid mix-ins such as cookie crumbles, chocolate chips, rhum-soaked raisins or the likes.

If time permits, just as when making ice cream the “normal” way, do try to pre-cool the mix-ins, so the re-freezing of the ice cream takes less time.

* Frozen yoghurt on the go – Get the best fruit yoghurt available to you and use it as ready-made base

Depending on the ingredients of your yoghurt (low-fat or what have you), this might in fact be a quite healthy option! Cool the yoghurt in the fridge for a while, then pour it straight into your ice cream machine. Churn until ice cream-like, and still quite soft. The delicious result should best be enjoyed as soon as its finished, since storing it in a freezer is likely to turn it rock-solid.

* Need to make a quick sorbet? Try a base of ready-made concentrated sweetened juice!

Since sorbet largely is a mixture of syrup and flavouring, you could try to replace a proper syrup with concentrated sweetened juice – after all, such juice in concentrated form is basically  syrup+flavouring combined, so you are not so far off the mark as it may seem with this one.

Be careful, however, if you plan on making sorbet on commercial sweet syrups. These often contain ingredients you may have difficulties with, both for reasons of taste and for reasons of production. Sweet syrups need to be properly diluted – not a big problem, perhaps, when preparing ice cream lollies, but more delicate when going for sorbet (go here). If the syrup is too sweet, your sorbet will never really freeze. If the syrup is too diluted, the result will often be too watered down, and icy (in a negative way).