Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book

Rating:
Summary: Enjoy The Taste Of ICe Cream!
Review: If you Love Ice Cream I would buy ben&jerry's book because its a good way to learn how to make it. A MUST for anyone making homemade ice cream. Breaks the recipes down into simple components that anyone can follow.

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Most importantly, the results are creamier and more delicious than any ice cream we ever made before we were given this book!

Rating:
Summary: A little Ben and Jerry's history mixed with great recipes
Review: I love ice cream. I bet Ben & Jerry won't mind my saying I love Haagen Dazs' Rum Raisin and Breyer's Butter Pecan and there's hardly anything more decadent than one of those Chocolate Dove Bars.

Ben & Jerry's is over the top, double-dog wicked good. They obviously got the idea of picking out big chunks of great-tasting items and putting them into their ice cream. Some of their flavors are so full of big chunks of chocolate, delicious nuts and flavorful fruits it seems like you can hardly find the ice cream for the goodies!

Ben & Jerry's is also a Great-American success story of a "Mom and Pop" business that started out with a couple of guys who wanted to make good ice cream.

This book is a bargain for Ice Cream lovers. You get easy-to-use recipes for hundreds of ice creams and other desserts - with favorites like "Cherry Garcia" and "Heath Bar Crunch". You also get a mini-history of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream company with interesting tidbits like their fight to allow their Ice Cream to be sold in groceries against one of the food superpowers, who was trying to push Ben & Jerry aside. If B&J hadn't won that legal battle it's unlikely you or I would have ever heard of them and their wonderful ice creams, but it's still fun to read the first-person of this little New England David slaying the corporate Goliath. Ben & Jerry are well-known for their support of environmental-friendly causes, and they also struck a wonderful blow for free enterprise! Anyway - read more about that in the book.

The book includes fantastic recipes, but also juicy tidbits - things you can do to your ice-cream or ingredients to make them "creamier" or have more "mouthfeel". For you cooks who love to experiment in the kitchen, this book gives you a great starting place - they give you several excellent "starter" base recipes. Then, once you've got your basic vanilla or chocolate (and they give you variations on each, along with their two cents about what makes one different from another) you can go crazy and add your own goodies.

Almost all of the recipes are to make a quart or quart and a half - exactly the right amount to go in one of those great new electric ice-cream makers. There are several of THOSE you can get for less than $30.

Only recommended for those who love ice cream. Is that you? Get the book - go crazy!

Rating:
Summary: This is perfect for small batches of ice cream
Review: I use the Donvier ice cream maker and this book - perfect combination. Every recipe I've tried is irresistable and delicious and very easy. The only problem is how to keep from making ice cream every day!

Rating:
Summary: A response/tip
Review: This really isn't a review, it's a post/message in response to Lisa M. Price's review on July 19, 2004. If you need a raw egg for most of the recipes, the easiest thing to do would be to coterize the egg by placing it in boiling water for 60 seconds. That kills the germs without boiling the egg. Happy ice cream making!


Rating:
Summary: When they say "generous" they MEAN it
Review: I tried out this book's chocolate chip cookie dough recipe along with my new Cuisinart quart ice cream maker today.

When they say "generous quarts" they MEAN it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing... but if you plan on adding mix-ins, I'd recommend adjusting the quantities by starting with half a batch. I seriously mean it: half a batch.

I should've known something was up with their recipe measurements when their sweet cream base added up to four cups of material (three of milk and cream, three-quarters for sugar, and two eggs) and then they were talking about another cup and a half of add-ins. Add the fact that ice cream expands by at least a quarter to a half when you mix it...

I ended up with closer to "two quarts" than "one generous quart" when following the cookie dough directions accurately, and I had to hastily shut off the ice cream maker to keep from decorating the entire kitchen!

So I'd recommend doing the quantity math on their recipes and allowing a cup or two of space for the air that gets mixed in during the process. (Or the easier way is just to cut the recipe in half, like I said earlier.)

But to me the best part of this book (aside from the delicious recipes) is that it teaches you how to think about ice cream making. It teaches about things like how much air gets added, how to vary the types of ice cream bases for different purposes, how to judge what kinds of mix-ins to use and when to add them in the process, etc etc etc...

The ice cream tastes fabulous, and they teach enough about the theory and options of ice cream making that I feel confident in following their guidelines to come up with my own stylized versions of ice cream. (I want to come up with a lower-calorie, lower-cream version, just for starters. And I love green tea ice cream, so I want to come up with a less milky base for that. And I've never heard of anyone doing this but I think chai ice cream sounds like a fabulous idea. And so on, and so on...)

Rating:
Summary: Great book, but update is needed
Review: I received a Cuisinart ice cream maker last Christmas and, while I have come up with some great ideas on my own, I was looking for some new ideas to try. This book fits that bill admirably. I have found LOTS of good inspiration here. My only complaint is that it is a bit dated in that nearly all of the recipes call for raw eggs. I wouldn't want to substitute Egg Beaters since my favorite part of the egg (and the part that adds the richness of flavor) is the yolk, which is what EB leaves out. I'm considering cooking the base to make the base a custard-base in order to get around this problem. I will use this cookbook a lot, I am sure, but hope they eventually come out with an updated version!