Will it Ice-Cream? Holiday Edition

After thanksgiving, I and Mrs. Tycoon had a yearning for eggnog ice-cream, so we found a promising recipe and cranked up the ice cream maker. The result was nice, but I wouldn’t say it was eggnoggy. It lacked noggyness. This led us down the slippery slope that appears when children are given access to “equipment.” It’s exactly the reason my brother-in-law drove his new excavator into his own backyard, and dug giant holes for the fun of it.

Maybe you remember Blendtec’s eye-opening video series, “Will it Blend?” which put their blender to the test against golf balls, bic lighters and glow sticks, and inspired a nation of impressionable children to ruin their mothers’ blenders and iPhones in the same instant. I went through a similar phase in my twenties, with a Fry Daddy Jr. (A case-study in bad branding, and an equally poor deep fryer.) For weeks I terrorized the pantry, casting my wicked eye on anything edible. “Oh, yesss,” I’d hiss at the granola bars, “you’ll fry up nicely. Into the batter, my pretty.” I learned you can deep-fry slices of cake, but there are technical reasons why people don’t, along with digestive ones.

Now I have an ice cream maker. And you know what does taste like eggnog? Eggnog!

I understand that, as rash experiments go, this one is sort of—tame. Grocery store eggnog is made from milk, cream, eggs, sugar, spices, and thickeners. Those are not weird things to put in an ice cream maker. Those are the least weird things to put in an ice cream maker. But still, if it worked, just imagine! We could go on TikTok with our One Weird Trick Big Dairy Doesn’t Want You To Know! The best discoveries are the ones that seem obvious in retrospect.

On the other hand, when something seems obvious, but nobody’s doing it, there’s occasionally a reason.

The first thing I needed, if I meant to ice-cream a carton of eggnog, was a booze delivery method. I like eggnog fine without the bourbon, but I knew there’d be complaints if I left it out. So step one was to make Salt & Straw’s “Perfect Ice Cream Caramel,” adding two tablespoons of Maker’s Mark at the end.

The next part was by far the easiest. I poured eggnog from the carton right into the ice cream maker and let it churn. Meanwhile, I sacrificed three of Mrs. Tycoon’s almond-anise biscotti to the crusher.

All that remained was to pack the frozen eggnog with the carmel and cookie pieces, and leave it to cure in the freezer.

You can’t have ice cream for breakfast—that’s a rule everyone should follow. But this time of year the good light is in the morning, so I had tea for breakfast, and saved the ice cream for a morning snack (several minutes later.)

The Verdict:

The final product came out promisingly ice-cream-shaped. As for the taste, I’d give it a B minus, which is the worst grade for the needs of a newspaper food column. If it had gone better, I’d be TikTok famous already, and if it had gone worse, you’d have exciting pictures of a kitchen on fire.

If this were a high-budget cooking magazine, we’d send the interns back to the kitchen for another ten attempts, and they’d come up with something dandy.

The structure is more crystalline than I’d hoped. I suspect that when Darigold lists “milk and cream” as an ingredient, they mean it in the sense of “Simon and Garfunkle.” If I did it again, I’d supplement the cream. I’d also add sugar, which I did not expect. I knew that frozen treats need more sugar to taste equally sweet, but it’s strange to take a liquid that’s quintessentially sweet, and turn it into an ice cream that’s only sweet-ish. The caramel helped a lot in that regard, but ice cream shouldn’t need a crutch, IMHO.

What it does have is the noggyness our first attempt was missing. And when it melts, it melts into eggnog, which is the best failure case I can imagine.