Coffee Ice-Cream

This is a variation line rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes the plain cream or custard base printed above it in the Desserts chapter. A few notes on making it work with a modern freezer.

• The missing baseRead this as an addition to a sweetened cream (or cooked custard) base printed above it, whose quantity the line does not state. Absent that, use any vanilla ice cream base and treat the coffee and sugar here as the flavouring step.
• "Strong Larkin Coffee"Larkin was a mail-order grocery brand, and any strong-brewed coffee stands in for it. Brew it at roughly double strength, since a half cup of ordinary drip coffee will be lost in a large volume of cream, and cool it completely before it goes near the cream.
• Chill before churningThe base and the coffee should both be refrigerator-cold, ideally held overnight. Warm liquid in the canister means a long churn and a coarse, grainy texture.
• Don't increase the sugar furtherThe extra half cup is there for flavour balance, but sugar also depresses the freezing point. Add more and the mixture stays slushy and will not set firm in the canister or the freezer.
• "And freeze"At the time this meant a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked twenty minutes or more. A modern electric machine does much the same job in a comparable time; a pre-frozen canister needs to be frozen solid first, usually overnight.
• RipeningStraight from the churn this is soft-serve. Pack it into a chilled container, cover, and hold it in the freezer an hour or two to firm up and let the coffee flavour settle.
• YieldDepends entirely on the size of the base you start from; the added coffee and sugar increase the finished volume somewhat, as does the air worked in during churning.