Ice cream is a frozen foam made of milk fat, air, sugar, and flavoring.
Normally when liquids freeze, they become solid, hard, and unappetizing like an ice cube. To prevent that from happening, we want to keep the ice cream as a frozen foam, not a frozen liquid. We do that by adding air (by the churning of the machine), minimizing the amount of free water that can grow into large ice crystals, adding milk fat which does not freeze hard like water, keeping the milkfat and water homogenized (intimately mixed together) by mixing them in a blender and by using an emulsifier (eggs or liquid lecithin) to keep them from separating into separate layers of frozen water and milk fat.
All ice cream contains sugar. The purpose of the sugar is not to make it sweet, but to act like an anti-freeze and depress the freezing temperature. By adjusting the amount of sugar, you can lower the freezing temperature of the ice cream so that the water in the ice cream does not freeze solid.
The things that make ice cream creamy are the milk fat and whipped in air. The thing that makes it delicious is using excellent ingredients, including the milk, eggs, and heavy cream in the base mix, and high quality flavors such as fresh fruit, roasted nuts, soft rich chocolate, great cocoa powder, or high quality extracts or concentrates.
