Wednesday, March 4, 2015
A few weeks
ago, my city experienced a massive multi-day snowstorm that covered us in 12” –
18”. This was highly unusual for our
area, and no one quite knew how to deal with it. Snowplows were overburdened, schools and
businesses were closed, and everyone was posting about it online, including me.
Somewhere
in my flurry (heh) of Facebook status posts, my friend Tonya suggested I take
the time to make Snow Ice Cream. I had
no idea what she was talking about. I’d
grown up in central Texas where snow wasn’t a thing, and Snow Ice Cream isn’t
something you see in a restaurant.
Tonya, being super handy with urls, quickly sent me a recipe, the
ingredients of which were snow, milk, vanilla extract, and sugar.
I thought
it looked disgusting.
Reviews
bluntly stated what I was thinking: this was not an ice cream meant to be
delicious. It was just meant to be
fun. As one reviewer stated, “Snow ice
cream is not about creamy, gourmet ice cream.
It’s about gathering snow together in between making snow angels and
snowball fights, celebrating winter, and making memories.”
Quite
frankly, I didn’t want to waste my time and ingredients on this weird-looking
ice cream, and I didn’t want to try it.
I figured it’d be slushy and gross – kind of like sweet, icy milk. So I basically fobbed Tonya off and went back
to making that week’s ice cream, Margarita
Ice Cream.
However, as
the snow iced and melted, I kept thinking back to that ice cream. It seemed a shame that I hadn’t even tried it. What if it was secretly good? Wasn’t the point of this blog to try new
things? What kind of ice cream maker was
I if I didn’t even want to try Snow Ice Cream?
So I promised myself if it snowed again this year I would make Snow Ice
Cream.
Guess
what’s happening tonight?
As soon as
I remembered my internal promise, I grabbed a bowl and a camera and ran
outside, utterly bewildering my sister and girlfriend.
First I
gathered a big bowlful of snow (The recipe calls for at least 8 cups.).
Then I ran back inside and gathered the necessary ingredients – milk, heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla extract (The original recipe only needs milk, but I didn’t have enough. Cream is a good substitute.).
Ignorant of
how long it would take snow to melt inside (like I said, I’m from Texas), I
quickly started throwing in ingredients.
First went
the milk and heavy cream.
Then in
went the sugar.
And finally
the vanilla extract.
I stirred
everything together vigorously, still inanely worried about disrupting the
snow’s integrity by stirring too much.
And
voila! Snow Ice Cream!
Snow Ice
Cream is weird. It’s definitely not
creamy or gourmet. In fact, it’s rather
grainy, and the sugar never truly gets incorporated. If, like me, you’re slightly worried about
stirring too much, you can get big chunks of sugar. And if, like me again, you just throw
everything in haphazardly, you might get inconsistent flavoring, but stirring
fixes that.
For all of
that, it’s pretty tasty and refreshing, like a watery, chunky vanilla
milkshake. The texture is so weird that
you can’t get mad at it for not behaving like normal ice cream – it’s just way
too far from normal. It melts really
fast on your tongue, but that means you just want to eat more and more. My sister, girlfriend, and I just stood
around the bowl scooping up spoonful after spoonful and taking shots of
it. It was actually a lot of fun.
So I guess
it was worth trying. Next time, I’d like
to plan it a little more and take my time adding the ingredients. I’d also like to invite some friends over and
make more of an event about it. But I am
really glad that I tried it so, thanks, Tonya, for suggesting it and tricking
me into eating an excess of P. Syringae.
For anyone
who’d like to try it, the basic recipe I used comes from allrecipes.com. You can find it here. My only change was that I used 1 cup of milk
and 1 cup of heavy whipping cream. Have
fun!
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