Globe of Perfection

This marvelous sphere of Nutella Gelato to the left is a creation from yours truly.  NO THANKS to yet another shit ball of a recipe from foodnetwork.com. It's 0 for 3 and I've had it with their crap.  This time I followed some cyanide tip from Giada de Laurentis and it came out like frozen chocolate colored ice and completely lacks the texture of real ice cream. So after some consultation with the internet (thanks to Nancy for letting me know about this NYC ice cream blog) and some ice cream tips from several cookbooks, I managed to cobble together my own nutella ice cream recipe on my second attempt and I made magic, as seen on your left.

Ingredients are:

2 cups of cream
1 cup of milk
3/4 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of nutella
5 yolks

FYI on how much Giada's recipe sucks, she said to use 1 cup of cream and 2 cups of milk and 4 yolks. I guess that might be ok if you're looking for ice cream without the cream part of the equation but what the hell is the point if ice cream doesn't coat your tongue with the fatty feel of buttery creamy goodness.  Then again, she is thin and stunning, so she has that going for her.  Either way, I have learned the valuable lesson that thin cooks should not be trusted and like psychics and fortune tellers, Food Network is for entertainment only and their advice is not to be taken seriously. 

Instructions:
1. Heat the cream, milk and 1/4 cup sugar on low heat. Don't boil it! Just heat it.
2. Whisk the yolks with 1/2 cup of sugar in a mixer.  It really helps if you have an electric mixer otherwise you're gonna have to beat the shit out of it by hand and that's tiring as heck.  You're gonna have to keep going until it's very light yellow and if going by hand it's gonna be a heck lot of heavy duty egg beating a mano.
3. Slowly mix in the heated cream mixture into the eggy mixture (technical term is custard) Once again, don't be overzealous and go high heat on this shit. You're making ice cream, not pancakes.
4. Flip all this shit back into the saucepan on low heat and keep stirring it until it's real thick. Giada says 7- 10 mins but she is wrong so don't listen to her.  It took me more than 20 mins. She also says keep going until "it coats the back of a wooden spoon", which is really vague so the first time I did it I just had the timer going and clocked in 10 mins.  But I should have trusted my own instincts. Everyone's had ice cream before in their lives, just think back to what melted ice cream looks like and approximate that consistency. Forget about this "coat the back of the spoon" b.s.
5.  Add the nutella and keep stirring until it melts into the mixture. I find it helps if you warm up the nutella beforehand by putting it in a double boiler. I don't actually have a double boiler so I put the nutella in a bowl and the bowl in the middle of a pan of water and turned the stove on low/med heat.
6.  Let the nutella custard mixture cool and then put in fridge til it is chilled completely
7.  Put this stuff in your ice cream maker and churn for 15-20 mins
8. Enjoy this creation that is called gelato (that's Italiano for soft serve custard based ice cream) or stick this in an airtight container and freeze it for a few hours to make the Christmas miracle that we know of as ice cream

As you can see, I'm already a better ice cream maker at attempt #2 than a so-called expert on TV. This has boosted my confidence so much that I announced to Nancy that I'm going to have my own ice cream parlor one day.  I might also look into writing cookbooks in the meantime.  

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