What the Germans Call 'children's chocolate.' Fine by me.

Our freezer didn’t hold a lot of different flavors of ice cream when I was a kid. I remember a stretch when we went through a lot of Neapolitan—the Italian tricolor of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate—but most of the time it was just vanilla.

Part of the reason for this was that my dad is a borderline diabetic. He doesn’t quite have diabetes, but the fear is that he’s just a few helpings of sugar away from it. As a result dad has had to avoid the vast majority of sugary treats my mom made, and he’s done a great job, for the most part.

Vanilla ice cream was one of the few treats he was allowed to enjoy—in moderation.

Even so we’d often find dad standing at the open freezer door with an ice cream carton in one hand and a spoon in the other. It wasn’t really sneaking. He was just leveling the surface so the ice cream looked smooth and untouched. If the excess found its way into his mouth, well, who could blame him?

You can see why we didn’t have a huge variety of flavors.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t improvise.

Mom blended a terrific banana milkshake. And we kids used the occasional strawberry, caramel and various other kinds of sauce to mix things up a bit too. Our favorite was chocolate. We used Hershey’s syrup (which came in a can back then) to make our own chocolate ice cream. Of course, since we had to let the ice cream melt a lot before we could blend the syrup in completely, the result was more like a cold chocolate soup.

It was also a soup that never, ever, made it to room temperature.

That “soup” was the inspiration for this week’s recipe. Please note the italics on the word inspiration. My chocolate ice cream is a lot better. And you don’t have to take my word for it either. My wife called it one of my best and both kids thought it was great too. The big difference was the richness of the chocolate, although it didn’t hurt that the ice cream was actually frozen.

I started out by making the custard base for the ice cream. Then I folded in the cream, some vanilla and six ounces of milk chocolate chips, good ones, Ghirardelli. Because the chips were all the same size, they melted very uniformly (unlike blocks or roughly chopped pieces). And when I heated up the mixture over a double boiler, the chips blended easily into the custard turning it a rich brown color.

If you don’t have a double boiler, you can do what I did and put the unfrozen custard into a stainless steel bowl and rest it atop a pot with an inch or two of water in it. As you bring the water to a boil, it heats up the chocolate just enough to melt but not burn. Then you cool it down for a bit and freeze.

It’s probably not something my dad should have, but if he wants to sneak a few spoonfuls, I’m not going to tell anyone.

Chocolate Ice Cream
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
½ tsp vanilla
6 oz. milk chocolate chips

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then fold in cream, vanilla and chocolate chips.
2. Heat over a double boiler, stirring frequently to blend the chocolate into the custard as the chips melt. When the chocolate is completely dissolved into the mixture, place a sheet of plastic wrap directly over the liquid’s surface to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
3. When the custard has cooled, freeze it in an ice cream maker for 30-35 minutes.
4. After the ice cream has been frozen, place it in your freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “100% Chocolate,” photo by the author. 

My dad, like all dads, taught us the classic rhyme ‘I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.’  I have since passed it onto my kids as well. If you also learned this from your dad , let me know in a comment. And if you’ve got any other good jokes your dad loved telling, pass those along too.