If You Make Nothing Else, Make Homemade Ice Cream
No other dish so successfully combines low cost, high quality, and the possibility for madcap experimentation
Every cook knows that different foods have different work-to-reward ratios. Some foods are high effort and high payoff — like gnocchi, New York-style cheesecake, or shrimp gumbo. Other foods deliver less reward for the same amount of work (homemade bagels, we’re looking at you). But the real gems are the low-effort, high-reward dishes — recipes that return a delicious payoff but ask little more from you than patience.
I’m here to help you optimize this equation. If you’re still deciding where to invest your limited cooking time in order to reap the greatest possible reward, your search is over.
The answer is homemade ice cream.
The ingredients in homemade ice cream are exceedingly simple. At a minimum, you need just two: cream and some sort of sweetener (sugar, honey, and maple syrup are all valid choices). A bit of milk also helps. You certainly don’t need the emulsifiers and vegetable oils you find when you browse the grocery aisles, with their euphemistically named “frozen ice desserts.”
