Making the Ice Cream Base

Todd Gray: Hi, I am Todd Gray, we are in the wine served Equinox Restaurant and we are making vanilla ice cream. Let's get started by making the base. First, I have poured our whole milk, our two cups of sugar, a half of vanilla bean. One thing it's important is to understand that we have to split our vanilla bean by splitting it end to end. We take the back of the knife, expose it into that bean and scrape it slightly, to expose those pod like seeds, while the flavor is in our vanilla bean. I'll be sure to get all of those pod like seeds off the our edge of our knife, a lot of flavor in those. We'll drop our bean in, take our whisk again, be sure that we incorporate to make sure that all that milk and sugar and vanilla start to come together, the sugar is dissolved and we let that cook for several minutes until it comes to a simmer.

While that is simmering, I'll take one of our stainless steel mixing bowls and I will just transfer our egg yolks to the bowl. Using a small rubber spatula to be sure that we get all that egg yolk from the cup into the bowl, there we go. We are going to be needing to tamper the egg yolks which is tampering is a process by which we are taking our warm milk and slowly adding in into our egg yolks. A little trick. If you don't have anyone in the kitchen to help you to keep this stirring process from being too difficult, we'll lay down a small towel, we place our bowl back on the towel and this will give us the stability that's needed so that when we stir, we don't have a whole lot of problems with the bowl moving around.

What we need to do now is to prepare an ice bath. Now that our milk, sugar and vanilla is almost at the stage in which we want, almost right below the simmering point, we want to make sure we don't boil this too long, as we could have separation or breakage of the milk. Our ice bath has been prepared with several -- a half a bowl of ice cubes to cool this down. Our egg yolks here need to be tampered. With the help of our ladle, we are going to start adding very slowly, this hot milk, vanilla and sugar mixture into our yolks and you see how that towel is helping the bowl stay nice and stabilized. We add gradually, gradually, just drizzle some in, this is tampering. If we add it too quick, we are going to have some scrambled eggs, which is not what we are looking for here. We'll add another one, about eight or ten ounces total.

Getting these egg yolks to temperature very gradually, okay. Now what we are going to do, I'll add one more ladle, I am going to add these egg yolks back to our pot of simmering milk, vanilla and sugar. While it's beginning to simmer, slowly add this mixture back, whisking continuously for the very same reason, we don't want this to curdle or to overcook. Basically, we are preparing a custard base, this is what this is. Take our towel, as our pot is getting hot. Now what we are going to do, we are going to cook this, we are going to cook this for about a minute and a half, two minutes to slightly cook our egg yolks just to about 165 degrees. Now that our mixture has gotten up to temperature, we are going to turn our fire off and we are going to pass this though our fine mesh strainer. Here we go, right over our ice bath, our one stainless steel mixing bowl sitting on top of the other. We will knock through any extra, pushing all little vanilla beans that's on the bottom, extracting any of those pods that might come through.

Oh yeah, we've got a beautiful ice cream base. Now we have to cool this base by slowly whisking over our ice bath, we'll cool this down and then when we come back, we are going to place our ice cream base into our machine and we are going to run it for about 45 minutes.