TWD - Vanilla Ice Cream

I have worn out the ice cream maker this summer......strawberry sorbato, honey peach, just plain peach, and several others. So when Lynn of Cafe Lynnylu picked Dorie's Vanilla I was excited.

There were plenty of "playing around" options for this recipe but I really wanted to keep this simple. Vanilla ice cream is the perfect accompaniment to soooo many things and I wanted to see if this beat out my favorite store version.

It did.

This is a custard based ice cream which seems to intimidate some people. Other than taking a bit more time, custard doesn't freak me out. Yeast....now that's another story for another day, but custard and I are cool with each other.

Dorie calls for either soaking a scraped vanilla bean in the warm milk/cream mixture for 30 minutes or adding pure vanilla extract later. I had vanilla paste in the pantry that I've always wanted to try so that's what I used. I wasn't sure whether to add it at the end like the vanilla extract or let it sit in the warm milk, so I compromised and added it to the warm milk and just letting it sit for 15 minutes. It worked that way but probably would have worked the other way, too.

I served this to Miss Charlotte with some crushed oreos on top. She said it was fantastic. I still have a lot left along with some oreos that need to be GONE before I start eating them, so I think I'm going to put the rest into an ice cream pie with an oreo crust of some kind. I'll let you know.