Ice Cream - Making Your Own

After years of frustration with our modest old ice cream machine, I splurged and bought a Gaggia – the gold-standard of home machines. After all, it was a month of special occasions – a special birthday for my husband, our anniversary, and seven years since we returned to Israel.

I had other, even better excuses – the poor quality of low-fat ice cream, the lack of flavorful fruit sorbets and no kosher gelato. Yes, I know they're available in Tel Aviv, but here in Beer Sheva, there's very little to choose from. Grocery-store brands are filled with gums, stabilizers, vegetable fat and loads of sugar. They taste more like marshmallows than ice cream. Even our very own "Glida (Ice Cream) Beer Sheva" is mediocre tasting.

I just wanted to make low-fat, low-calorie, palette-popping frozen desserts. So I've been on a bit of a binge. I started with:

Pistachio gelato

Chocolate sorbet (parve)

Mexican chocolate (cinnamon and a bite of chili) ice cream

Peach frozen yogurt

Matcha (Japanese green tea) ice cream

Then I moved on to:

Pistachio gelato made with almond milk (parve)

Fresh cherry and chocolate chunk gelato

Dulce de Leche ice cream with pecans

What's the trick to delicious low-fat frozen desserts?

1. For "ice cream" I use a mixture of 2 cups low-fat (1%) milk and 1 cup half and half (10% cream). That comes out to about 4% total fat – a lot less than the 20-some percent fat in store-bought premium ice creams.

2. For gelato, I use 1% milk cooked with cornstarch to a soft pudding. (Use either the microwave or the stovetop to cook the mixture.) The ratio is 3 cups of milk to 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. Add the flavors or fruit and refrigerate the mixture until it's completely cold.

3. I don't use egg-based custards. Eggs add custard-like richness, but they also add cholesterol and fat calories. Instead, I concentrate on flavors with pizzazz.

4. Cold dulls the flavor of things. For example, even though I cooked the cherries first and then steeped them in the milk/cornstarch mixture, my cherry gelato still lacked excitement. The peach frozen yogurt was also on the dull side, even though I used lots of fresh, ripe peaches and tangy sheep's milk yogurt. Back to the drawing board on fruit flavors.

5. Flavor is everything! When you're not using eggs and high fat milk and cream, you've got to emphasize flavor – use the best chocolate, nuts, fruit and spices. Even then, things don't always work out. For instance, we only had high quality matcha tea powder (my husband is a Japanese-tea specialist!) which was barely perceptible in our ice cream. Next time we'll try stronger, lower-grade matcha.

What's next on my flavor agenda? I'm thinking about halvah ice cream and espresso gelato. And fresh mango sorbet for next Shabbat.

I'm not suggesting that you buy an expensive ice cream machine. (There are plenty of good machines available in all price ranges.) But if you enjoy frozen desserts and are looking for a healthier, tastier treat than you can buy at the store, you may want to try your hand at making it yourself.