Peanut Butter Ice Cream w/ Reese’s Cups

My recent rant over boxed mashed potatoes concluded with a vichyssoise recipe. The point was that it can be at least as cheap and nearly as quick to cook with actual produce as with fake food. In passing I also mentioned preservatives, which of course is an issue with pouched mashed potatoes and other flaky, powdery, gummy, suspiciously instant items. I’m hardly a puritan on the issue, but there is at least one dish I usually buy but makes me feel especially virtuous when I go the homemade route: ice cream.

For homemade ice cream you need to buy an ice cream maker, which isn’t cheap, and depending on how much ice cream you eat it may or may not pay for itself, as they say. However, unless you and the family are lactose intolerant, I’m betting it does.

From-scratch ice cream is so simple and incredibly pure that even in our apartment, with the gridlock honking and Occupy Wall Street chants crashing through the windows, I feel like I’m on my very own dairy farm. Milk, cream, eggs, sugar. That’s about it.

Unfortunately, ice cream is the most preference-laden concoction I can think of. What other prepared food is sold in as many varieties and commands as much supermarket acreage? Which complicates the issue for the home ice cream maker who can go rapidly from dairy farmer to paralyzed obsessive.

And so I’m here to simplify. In my view there are two types of ice cream: with and without stuff. In other words, say, vanilla versus butter pecan. Personally, I need stuff in my ice cream, and I suspect you do too. However, the beauty of ice cream is that for the stuff and the stuffless the recipe is more or less the same. You just toss the stuff through the chute near the end of the process.

For me, ice cream requires peanut butter hence the following peanut butter and Reese’s cup version. It is delicious, but-unless I’m misreading the Reese’s package-hardly preservative free. There goes my dairy farmer illusion; right out the window…onto the chaos below.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Ice Cream (from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book by Bruce Weinstein)
Makes about 1 quart

¾ cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup milk
½ cup creamy peanut butter
1 ½ cups heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup crushed Reese’s cups

1. In a medium mixing bowl, beat the sugar and eggs till thickened and pale yellow. Set aside.
2. Bring the milk to a simmer in a medium pot, slowly beat the hot milk into the eggs and sugar. Pour mixture back into the pot and place over low heat. Stir constantly with a whisk or wooden spoon till custard thickens slightly. Don’t let it boil. You don’t want scrambled eggs.
3. Remove from the heat and beat in the peanut butter. Strain through a fine strainer into a large, clean bowl and cool slightly. Stir in the cream and vanilla. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
4. Stir the chilled custard then freeze in 1 or 2 batches in the ice cream machine. When semi-frozen, add 1 cup crushed Reese’s cups and let the machine finish its magic.