Can you make ice cream with a Thermomix?
The questions that come up most when someone starts out: whether a Thermomixwill do, which ice cream maker to begin with, which ingredients you really need, and whether you can make ice cream without cream, gluten-free, sugar-free or vegan. A short, honest answer to each.
With a Thermomix you can prepare the mix — in fact it's great for that, since it weighs and measures temperature — but you can't churn with it: it doesn't chill and stir the mix at the same time, which is exactly what churning is. You can make a sort of «ice cream» by freezing the mix and blitzing it in the Thermomix. It has to be eaten straight away, and technically it isn't ice cream and doesn't come close; some people are happy with that, personally I'm not.
Can you start with the 20-euro ice cream maker from Lidl?
You can start with that machine — plenty of people in the Facebook group where we talk shop do exactly that. To make homemade ice cream with it, though, there are several things to keep in mind:
- You need room in the freezer to keep the bowl.
- That machine holds 750 ml, so you'd have to halve the quantities in the recipes on this site.
- When you churn, the bowl has to be very, very cold or the ice cream won't come out right.
- You can't make two batches back to back: the bowl needs 24 hours to freeze again.
- The churn will never match a compressor machine — power, stirring speed and so on.
Many people start with this one and end up buying a compressor machine once they hit its limits.
Which compressor ice cream maker should I buy?
There are plenty of domestic compressor machines on the market at around 150-300 €, broadly similar to one another and differing mainly in power and capacity. They are a long way from a professional batch freezer, but they are the only home option unless you want to step up to the semi-professional range, which starts at 800-2000 €.
What I would look at when buying a compressor machine is power and capacity. I'd want at least 150 W and 1.5 litres so the recipes on this site work without trouble. They're getting more affordable all the time; here's the link to the ice cream maker comparison we put together: Click HERE
Which ingredients do I need for creamy ice cream that doesn't go icy?
To start making properly formulated, balanced ice cream you need some basic ingredients and some more technical ones. Here's the link to the information on INGREDIENTS.
Since we know these ingredients are hard to find, here's the link with the information to get them all in one go HERE.
This is all far too complicated, I'll carry on doing it badly
You're quite wrong: making ice cream at home is easy, and the process for making homemade ice cream is very simple. After a couple of batches you'll see the method is the same every time. The hardest part may be tracking down all the ingredients, and there we can help you.
Start hereHow to make ice cream at home, step by stepThe complete guide, written for a domestic machine.See how it's done →
Well, I make ice cream with a blended banana and yoghurt and it tastes great
Of course it tastes good, nobody says otherwise, but it has nothing to do with real ice cream. Like everything in life it depends on your palate and on how much you enjoy cooking, so spending a little time on a proper homemade ice cream will be worth it to you or not. We explain it calmly in this video: why blended banana isn't ice cream.
Can I make homemade ice cream without cream?
Of course you can. Plenty of ice creams contain no cream, and you can even make sorbets with no fat at all.
The biggest mistake I see in the recipes floating around online is loading ice creams with cream for no reason. Ice cream should be formulated and balanced to hit a target fat percentage, not filled with cream for the sake of it.
Can you make low-fat, low-calorie ice cream?
If you follow the recipes on this site, there are ice creams with only 4% fat, and sorbets for instance have no fat at all.
I have coeliac disease — can I make ice cream at home?
Of course. There are thousands of options for coeliacs, and even the ones with a crumble or biscuit topping can be made with gluten-free flour. A very close friend of mine is coeliac, so I'm fairly up to speed on it.
I'm diabetic — can I make homemade ice cream?
This is a delicate subject and we've written a blog post about it. You can read it HERE.
Can you make ice high-protein ice cream at home?
You can — there are plenty of high-protein ice creams. But protein isn't added by eye: it has to be calculated, because it dries the ice cream out and changes both its texture and its freezing point. Once you know how, you can add a properly measured extra dose and build a higher-protein ice cream. A friend of mine started recently and is already calculating his own protein ice creams to fit his training.
I'm vegan — can I make vegan ice cream at home?
Absolutely, there are plenty of vegan options. Work is being done with potato and pea proteins, though those are harder to get hold of. My advice is to start with the sorbets on the site, which are entirely suitable for vegans.
