There is nothing more satisfying on a summer day than a beach, saltwater and a scoop or two of a nice cold flavoured ice cream.
There is a handful of people on the planet of earth that don’t love ice cream. What isn’t there to love really?! You get cold, sweet, fruity dessert to cool you on a hot day and all of us enjoy it. When it comes to ice cream there are several ways to make it and depending on your taste one will be more preferred than the other. The simplest way of making ice cream is by flavouring ice chips with some sort of flavour that can be bought in the store. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, melon or any other flavour are ready, pre-made and easily obtained. All you have to do is freeze some water, make ice chips from it and add your preferred flavour.
If you have a bit more refined palate then you would prefer something hand made from scratch like real creamy ice cream with fresh fruit in it, or professionally hand made and delivered to you. If you can make one for yourself and if you want to know how to elevate its taste like a pro then keep reading because the tips are coming right now!
1. Fruit
When you are making fruit flavoured ice cream you need to know one thing – sweet and salty go hand in hand with each other. This is a little-known trick that professionals use and it calls for a combination of very sweet fruit with salt. What salt does is enhance and elevate the taste of fruit and with that, you get a more rich, flavoured and strong fresh-fruit taste in pretty much anything, including ice cream. If you like fruit tastes like melon, strawberry and the like, feel free to chop them up, add some salt to them let them sit a bit and then add them to your ice cream. After it is done, frozen and ready to serve you have one more task that will be more difficult than the entire preparation so far – restraining yourself from eating it all at once in one go. This nifty little trick will come in handy if you plan to make homemade ice cream for your friends. They will all love it and you should be prepared for the salvo of praises…
2. Storage
What ruins the taste and smell of most things stored in the fridge or a freezer are foods that have strong smells. Frozen fish, pizza and other things have very strong scents when frozen and they can easily transfer those scents to other foods if they are stored close to them. The best thing you can do to avoid that and to retain that nice, sweet, fruity flavour of your ice cream is to store it as far away from these foods as possible. This way it will retain its freshness, its natural taste and smell, and its flavour will be exquisite. The last thing you, or your company, want to eat is a strawberry ice cream that smells like frozen carp.
3. Texture
The taste of the ice cream is not always in the ingredients that go in it, there is something to the texture of the food as well. To get the best texture possible, you need to push your ice cream as far back in the freezer as possible. This will make it retain its creaminess and its rich, smooth texture and avoid the frozen, gritty ice crystals that form on the ice cream. The reason that these ice crystals for is because most of us keep our ice cream at the front and if we tend to open our freezer frequently it starts to melt and freeze all over again, and during that process, you get these ice crystals that make it chewy, gritty and plain dull. To avoid it push it back in the freezer as possible and find the coldest spot that will always retain the same temperature.
4. Serving
Most of us get the serving of the ice cream wrong. What most of us do to serve the ice cream easily and more beautifully is to let it sit outside for some time for it to soften to the amount that is proper for serving. This destroys its consistency, its texture and its smoothness which is why you need to change these habits. You need to get yourself an ice cream scoop if you don’t have one already, and you need to place it in warm water for several seconds. When the scoop gets properly heated up take out your ice cream and scoop it like a pro. This will have the ice cream slightly melt but only in a place you are scooping, providing you with the perfect scoop that is ready to be served and not become soggy and mushy.
5. Add-ons
If you are making your ice cream at home, or even if you are buying yours from a reputable store or source like we mentioned in the beginning, and if you still want more flavour from it then there is a simple solution – use add-ons. Most of us like to play with our food when it comes to taste, so why would ice cream be any different. There is a variety of add-ins and toppings you can choose from and make your scoop of ice cream taste even better. Sprinkles, dried fruit, fresh fruit (with some salt on the sweet once like we talked about), white or dark chocolate shavings and plenty more can be added to a regular scoop of ice cream to make it stand and taste more than it already has. Your imagination is your limit, so give it your best.
Ice-creams are the simplest and best way to satisfy your desire for something sweet and cool on the summer days. Thankfully it is that type of food that isn’t reserved for summer-only, and if you like it so much you can enjoy it all year round.
The ways we just wrote about can enhance your experience with ice creams and can enhance and add to the flavour of almost any ice cream. Try everything out and you will see what are we talking about.