Cook Monkeys

The end of the school year was approaching. Finals were almost upon us. So what does a nostalgic college student do? They make hand-cranked vanilla ice cream with a bunch of friends.

When my dad came up to visit me a few weeks prior (at my request) he brought up one of the official Boyer ice cream making buckets and hardware.

For years my family has been making different varieties of homemade ice cream in our buckets for summer birthday parties and the like. It’s always a fun event of mixing the cream and flavoring together and filling the bucket, setting up the bucket hardware, filling with ice and salt, and then cranking it slowly to thicken the cream into an icy paste-like dessert confection.

We invited people over who were the kind of people who would enjoy this type of event (or just ice cream in general). I ran into some issues with having the gallon jug of whole milk freezing in the auxillary fridge (we had to fast-thaw it in pots of hot water) and with ice consumption problems. Overall, however, the production was quite a success, producing ice cream thicker than I recall my family ever making. Unless of course you count the time my dad added some Xanthan gum (a commercial-grade food thickening agent) to the batch and we almost had to eat the ice cream with a fork and knife.

More photos from myself and Matt.