How to make proper vanilla ice cream

I could map out my life geographically and temporally in scoops of ice cream. From the oyster delights handed over in tracing-paper napkins from Minchella’s hatch in South Shields on the beachfront, to the little silver coupe bowls of ice cream we ordered every night on family holiday in France (always the same, one ball of pistachio, one of blackcurrant). The perfect brown-bread ice cream I had at Andrew Edmunds in Soho when I first moved to London. An elder-flower ice cream with a damson swirl that we ordered on honeymoon in the Cotswolds; a strikingly memorable blue-cheese ice cream which was the first thing I ate upon arriving in Bilbao. A red-bean ice bar we were handed as we stepped out of a sweltering day in Georgetown into a cool and calm hotel. A single scoop of a rich, tangy, sticky cream-cheese ice cream that saved an otherwise lacklustre meal. The taste I had of my husband’s ‘Kentucky chocolate’ ice cream in Rome, a mixture of dark chocolate and tobacco, which he was lukewarm on, and I thought was perhaps the best ice cream of my life.

Gelato and sorbets have their places, but a proper custard-based ice cream is a thing of aesthetic and textural beauty

And then there are those I made. There was the summer I squirrelled away every fig leaf I could lay my hands on, and we ate fig-leaf ice cream until Christmas. An unusually autumnal ice cream I made of barely sweetened crème fraîche with dark caramel-golden apple butter swirled through it. A stout ice cream that I can still taste when I think about it. I’ve made ice creams infused with nutmeg, with hot cross buns, with yeast (that one’s an acquired taste). My freezer drawer sometimes resembles a graveyard of the less successful ice creams that I can’t quite bring myself to throw away. I’m still ploughing my way through a vegan piña colada gelato – great at first, but now rock-hard – and a quince sorbet which tasted fantastically like liquid quince, but unfortunately wasn’t far off the texture of liquid quince.

I definitely have a wandering eye when it comes to ice cream flavours: I want to try all of them, the more unusual the better. But again and again I come back to the original and the best: vanilla. The fact that vanilla is a byword for boring and two-dimensional is a gross injustice. Endlessly aromatic, it can be incredibly floral, a little smokey, sometimes a touch fruity or even spicy. I honestly believe that vanilla is one of the most exciting flavourings you can use in cooking.

Gelati and sorbets have their places, but a proper custard-based ice cream is a thing of aesthetic and textural beauty: a pale 1970s magnolia base, heavily punctuated with vanilla freckles, kept rich and soft by the higher proportion of cream in the crème anglaise base. If you don’t have proper vanilla pods, you can make this with vanilla paste, but avoid vanilla extract or essence. You need the concentration and strength of the flavour here, you need the black speckles. It’s worth getting the good stuff.

Vanilla ice cream is the perfect foil to almost any pudding (the same cannot be said for yeast ice cream). Every type of crumble, pie or cobbler imaginable; raspberries and peaches in a peach Melba; chocolate sauce and soft poached pear in a pear belle Hélène; sticky toffee pudding; chocolate fondant: they all cry out for vanilla ice cream.

It is important to add that, due to the lack of stabilisers and additives – which of course is a huge part of the joy – homemade ice cream is at its best eaten as soon as possible after churning. And that’s what we did. We ate this sitting in the garden, first as affogato, freshly frozen and then drowned in hot espresso, so the last few spoonfuls melted into a coffee milkshake. The next day we had it in perfect boules, alongside an apricot and orange blossom compote. But given the beauty of proper vanilla ice cream, it’s just as good scooped straight into a cone, and eaten before the ice cream starts to run down your arms towards your elbows.

Makes 1 pint

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