Ice Cream Base Mixes:
An ice cream base mix is a pre-mixed combination of milk, cream, sugar, and other ingredients that is common to all ice cream recipes. Commercial ice cream manufacturers each have their own ice cream base mix that they use to make all of their flavors of ice cream. They pour in the base, and then add whatever concentrated flavor, fruit, cookies, candy, nuts or other inclusions they want to make a particular flavor of ice cream. Even though there are only a few ingredients in an ice cream base mix, there are thousands of variations. At the ice cream class I attended, one of the instructors who owns a dairy said his dairy has over 100 different base mixes that they sell routinely, and that they had tried over a thousand variations.
Our Ice Cream Base Mix:
We tried 18 different base mix recipes. We checked to see how they tasted, if they were grainy, how creamy they were immediately after making them, and how they were each day afterward for about a month. We settled on two bases that we like the best. They come from the “Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book”. We refer to them as Ice Cream Base Mix #1 and Ice Cream Base Mix #2. These are the starting points for almost all of our recipes and are included with our recipe files.
In our recipes, all of them use our Ice Cream Base Mix #1, but we break out the Ice Cream Base Mix separately from the rest of the recipe so that it is easy for you to switch and use a different base mix if you have another one that you prefer.
Our Ice Cream Base Mix #1 has five ingredients—1 cup whole milk, 2 pasteurized eggs, ¾ cup sugar, a dash of salt, and 2 cups of heavy whipping cream. This is a very smooth, clean base and is our personal favorite.
Our Ice Cream Base Mix #2 has four ingredients—¾ cup sugar, 2/3 cup half and half, a dash of salt, and 2 cups whipping cream. It is even creamier than Base #1 and the milk fat content is high enough that it does not require eggs, but some people find it too creamy and buttery.
These two base mixes are also included on their own as recipes and are very tasty even without any other flavoring, fruit, nuts, or other additives. The frozen base mix by itself is often referred to as Sweet Cream, since that is a good descriptor of it. One of my favorite ice creams to buy when I go to Coldstone is Sweet Cream with fresh raspberries mixed in. You can think of all of our recipes as Sweet Cream with caramel pecan, or Sweet Cream with peaches, etc.
You will notice that Ice Cream Base Mix #1, used in all of our ice cream recipes, call for 2 whole pasteurized eggs. They act as an emulsifier and keep the water and fat in the ingredients from separating. Be sure to read the Tip “Pasteurized Eggs Instruction Sheet” for an explanation of the reasons for and the method of pasteurizing eggs.
All of our recipes also call for a dash of salt as a flavor enhancer.