Mask Your Rebellion with Fake PPE

The new ice cream maker arrived today, and I wasted no time in breaking it in. I went to the store and bought frozen peaches, cherries, and strawberries. I decided to make cherry vanilla ice cream, because the hassle of making strawberry appeared to be greater.

I rooted around the web until I found a site that looked good. There are some simple rules you can follow when looking for good information about food. Here are some warning signs to keep you away from fakers who don’t know how to cook.

1. You see “foodnetwork” or “cooks.com” in the URL.

2. Alton Brown is mentioned somewhere on the page. In a favorable way.

3. You spot the phrases “vegan,” “egg-free,” “healthy,” or “gluten-free.”

4. The person who runs the site is a woman. This isn’t always a bad sign, but men generally do a better job.

I found a recipe for vanilla ice cream somewhere. Maybe it was Martha Stewart’s site. I don’t recall. I looked it over, and it seemed credible, so I copied it and, of course, changed it before I even gave it a chance. I removed a lot of steps that seemed to be a waste of time. It said to cook the custard before putting it in the machine. Hassle. Hassle.

I’ll post the ingredients I used.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups milk
2 cups heavy cream
6 yolks
lots of frozen dark cherries
4 oz. Karo lite corn syrup (bought by accident)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp. real vanilla extract
1 tbsp. starch
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. almond extract

Why starch? I read that even good cooks use things like guar gum and carageenan to get the very best texture. I don’t have those things. I stirred the starch into half a cup of milk, nuked it to boil it, and combined the result with the other ingredients. It must work, because the texture was straight from heaven.

I used corn syrup because it’s supposed to improve the texture. I didn’t realize it was the “lite” version when I bought it. I’m going to throw the remainder out and get the real thing. Everyone hates corn syrup and blames it for mankind’s ills, but it’s supposed to be better for ice cream than sugar.

I didn’t cook anything. Salmonella doesn’t scare me. I’m a man. I’m too old to be impressed by diarrhea.

I sliced the cherries and mixed them up with sugar, hoping to sweeten them and prevent them from freezing hard. I mixed all the other ingredients, threw them in the machine, and turned it on. Twenty minutes later, the ice cream was done. It was as hard as it was ever going to get without turning off the motor. I added the cherries, let the machine blend them in, and scraped the whole mess into a bread pan I had chilled in the freezer.

When you freeze ice cream, you don’t want a cylindrical container. You want a long, flat pan that will chill the ice cream faster.

Was the ice cream good? It was astounding. It had flaws, but it was still magnificent. The cherries were too hard and not sweet enough. Also, I didn’t use enough cherries. Other than that, it was ecstasy.

The recipe I prepared was a little too big for the machine, so I ended up having to leave maybe 10 ounces out. I need to rescale everything. Maybe I should go metric to make it easy.

The machine lives up to the hype. It’s fast. The ice cream’s ice crystals aren’t perceptible.

I think next time I’ll slice the cherries very thin, and I may soak them in a mixture of sugar, salt, and cherry Heering. The liqueur shouldn’t hurt the taste, and alcohol is used to prevent fruit from freezing hard in ice cream. If I give the cherries a day to soak, maybe they won’t get hard, and they’ll be sweeter.

The machine is easy to use, and it’s not too hard to clean up. It’s probably the best machine you can get for under a grand. The next step up is the Lello Musso Polo 5030 at $1200, and the expert I rely on says it’s not much better. Commercial machines start at a much higher price, and they make dozens of liters of ice cream. I think I did about as well as I reasonably could.

I feel like the end of the world is upon us. I might as well have decent ice cream.

In other news, I went to Zazzle.com, which is now censoring designs suggesting there may have been a wee bit of election fraud, and I designed some masks for myself. I’m also going to get some fake masks elsewhere. There is now a wide selection of “breathable” masks which don’t filter the air at all yet do get science-challenged people off your back in grocery stores. They offer the same level of protection as real masks (virtually none) plus a great deal more comfort.

What good is a apocalypse if we can’t have fun with it?