Red Wine Ice Cream

If you are anything like me, you enjoy an occasional glass of wine with your meal. You also enjoy some ice cream for dessert! I thought what better than to take two of my favorite vices, wine and ice cream, and combine them together. I have always struggled to make ice cream with alcohol in it, see my attempt at making a Baileys Ice Cream, in part because alcohol does not freeze well. My attempts may have improved slightly this time around, but I still have a long way to go when it comes to making alcohol flavored ice creams.

Some of you will also notice that I also introduced a new format to my blog. I made a section marked texture and a section marked flavor, as I think it is hard to talk about the success of an ice cream without going into the specifics of these two qualities. I then also talked about the overall quality of the ice cream. In the overall section, I ranked my ice cream using a five scoop scale (similar to the one I use to rank ice cream stores). Five scoops is the highest, 1 scoop is the lowest. I thought by ranking my ice creams, people could gain a better understanding of what I thought of my ice creams and determine which ones are worth trying to duplicate in their kitchens.

Red Wine Ice Cream

Ingredients:     

2 cups whole milk

4 teaspoons cornstarch

1 1/2 ounces cream cheese softened/room temperature

1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt

1 1/4 cups heavy cream

2/3 cup sugar (I would use less - maybe a 1/3 cup)

2 tablespoons dark corn syrup

Red wine (at least 1/2 a cup)
 

Preparation: 

1.  In a small bowl, mix about 2 tablespoons of milk with the cornstarch and whisk together.
2. In a medium bowl, add the salt and room-temperature cream cheese and whip all the bumps out. Set aside.
3. Pour the cream, sugar, corn syrup, and remaining milk into a 4-quart saucepan. Bring to a rolling boil over medium-high heat, set a timer for precisely 4 minutes and boil for exactly 4 minutes.
4. Add the cornstarch to the boiling milk mixture and stir until slightly thickened.
5. Gradually whisk the hot milk mixture into the cream cheese until smooth, adding about a cup of the hot milk mixture at a time and whisking the cream cheese mixture with an electric mixer for about two minutes in between each addition of the hot milk mixture. Continue until none of the hot milk mixture remains in the pot. 
6. Add in the red wine. Use your taste and judgement to add in however much red wine you would like. I started off adding in 2 tablespoons at a time of some left-over red wine I had sitting in the fridge. The tablespoons did not seem like enough, so I eventually stopped measuring and just poured in the rest of the bottle (I think it was around 1/2 cup).
7. Chill the mixture in the refrigerator until it is completely cold.
8. Put your mixture into your ice cream maker and churn. For red wine ice cream, my mixture needed close to an hour to churn.

Texture: For those of you who remember my last blog, you will remember that this is only my second time working with a cream cheese based ice cream. As such, it might not have been the wisest decision to work with an ingredient as fickle as alcohol. Nonetheless, I think I was able to straighten out the textural difficulties I had last week. Using an electric whisk, I beat the cream cheese mixture for about two minutes after every cup full of the hot milk mixture I added to it. I think this really helped to blend the lumps of cream cheese into the rest of the ice cream mixture and make a smoother, more fully composed "batter." While the texture of the ice cream was better, no lumps this week, it did take awhile for the ice cream to freeze because of the alcohol. It took almost a whole hour to churn and may take longer with some churners. 

Flavor: The flavor was not quite what I was expecting. Rather than tasting like wine, the ice cream tasted very fruity. This may be because in addition to the sugar that wine has in it, I added in the normal amount of sugar you would to an ice cream. If I was to make this ice cream in the future, I would drastically decrease the amount of sugar I was using.

Overall: This ice cream was ok. I would give it a 2.5/5 scoops. The consistency/texture was not bad, but it probably could have been improved had there not been alcohol in it. In addition, while the ice cream tasted nice and fruity, it was not the flavor profile I was expecting. It tasted more like a berry ice cream, less like a red wine ice cream. 

Until next time, keep calm and get your ice cream eating on.