So how is the green tea weight loss study going? After this first week, I can honestly say, I didn’t meet my goal of 1 pound for this first week but instead lost about half a pound. So where did I go wrong?

First I can say, I did cut back on the amount of food being eaten which is probably responsible for the half pound lost. Where I went wrong though is not actually drinking five cups a day and this is where it’s good to analyze stuff like this so you can avoid any obstacles you may have in reaching your goals.

As a working stiff, a majority of my day is spent at work and there wasn’t a way to make hot tea, nor did I have a thermos to transport hot tea to work. Today I remedied that problem with the purchase of a thermos. Buying pre-bottled green tea would also have worked but the green tea diet should be cheap and at $1.40 per bottle, that adds up.

For the food consumed, I really only have choices when it comes to breakfast in dinner. Lunch is provided by my company and here in Japan, it’s bad manners to not eat all of your food. On the plus side it’s Japanese food so that means lots of miso, nori, and rice and such. Japanese food also has lots of root vegetables which I think is supposed to be healthy. Breakfast is usually eggs and toast or toast with homemade marmalade. Dinner has been pretty standard American stuff, chicken and dumplings, pasta alla carbonara, homemade pizza etc. The only difference is that instead of eating two bowls of chicken and dumplings, I’m only eating one.
Originally, I thought my commute to work by bicycle was going to be enough as far as exercise go but from here on out, I’m going to try and add thirty minutes of using my Xoot Street to supplement the commuting. This will provide several benefits: Besides the extra aerobic exercise, with the addition of a backpack and a couple water bottles, I can get some strength training. Secondly, I gain in proficiency in riding the Xootr which will be a plus when I use the scooter for traveling. Hopefully too, my wife will start to feel as perhaps the Xootr just might be worth the money I spent on it, instead of some stupid nerdy toy. Finally, since I did write an article for this site reviewing the scooter, it’ll give me a chance to update that article on how well it’s holding up.

So to sum up, week one was either a failure or less successful than hoped. Analysis however, reveals the solution is very simple and so going into week two of the green tea diet, I feel hopeful. As it stands, the diet is: eat less, exercise 30 minutes a day (Xootr Street) and five cups of green tea. It’s very likely that there won’t be another update of my progress with the diet as constant updating is a bit geeky to me. The purpose of this post was to instead take a look at obstacles to meeting your goals and finding ways around those obstacles.

Why Green Tea Weight Loss?
One of the drawbacks about having a website on homemade ice cream, is that you can eat a lot of homemade ice cream. This isn’t necessarily a good thing for one’s waistline. When I left the military 10 years ago, I was a “studly” 185 pounds. Today, I am a mushy 240 pounds — not attractive! Having a daughter, and wanting to be a good parent, something has to be done if I’m to live to see my grandchildren. And thus the idea for the green tea weight loss challenge.

In my mind, the topic of weight loss is super sleazy. Probably about as sleazy as cell phones, check-cashing loans, infomercials, and credit cards for people with bad credit. What makes it so sleazy, is all the scams that attempt to exploit people who are unhappy with their appearance. As far as I know, there is only one way to lose weight and that’s the way combination of controlling your diet and exercise. In basic training at least, if you were overweight, they sent you to fat camp first where you ate nothing but salads and do exercise all day before you can join a platoon. So with that in mind, I’ll be adding 5 cups of tea to my diet daily for a sort of green tea diet.

Green Tea as a Weight Loss Tea
If you go to Wikipedia, and look up green tea and weight loss, you’ll find it written that there are no studies in Pubmed, done to attribute any measurable weight loss to green tea. However, I was able to find two studies, one by the Queen Margaret University, in Scotland and one in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition which did a study on the effects of green tea on postprandial (means after meals) thermogenesis/energy expenditure and fat oxidation. Fat oxidation is just a fancy way to say how the body uses energy from fat. More specifically, the study looked at the amounts of epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) in green tea. The study found that for one control group, 122 mg of EGCG/135 mg caffeine, energy expenditure increased by 2.9% and fat oxidation increased by 12%. That’s versus no significant change for a caffeine only control group. According to the website The World’s Healthiest Foods, one cup of green tea contains between 25 and 35 mg of EGCG so to reach 122 mg of snarf it would require that I drink 4.88 cups of green tea. So I guess what I’m saying, is sorry Wikipedia you’re wrong. Anyways, there are other reasons for choosing green tea as an addition to my diet. For one thing it’s cheap and secondly, I live in Kagoshima Japan, which has a healthy green tea industry so it’s available everywhere and nearly infinite varieties. In fact, if I go out on my balcony, I can see a store which specializes in green tea across the street. Lastly, one green tea weight loss study done by the University of Geneva found that by simply drinking 5 cups of green tea a day, without any further activity, the human body burned between 70-80 extra calories, in other words 525 calories a week on average.

A Green Tea Shop in Kagoshima, Japan as seen from my Balcony

The Weight-loss Goal
Nutritionists, often recommend starting with a weight-loss goal of losing 10% of your total body weight and for me, that’s 24 pounds. Furthermore, they consider a weekly weight loss goal of 1 to 2 pounds to be ideal. Therefore in order to lose 24 pounds it will take between three and four months.

The Green Tea Diet
I already feel that I get quite a bit of exercise in my daily routine. I cycle to work at a brisk pace, and fairly active job which means that I don’t spend all day sitting on my but but rather running around. So to achieve my weight loss objective, I’ll be cutting back on ice cream (would green tea ice cream be ok?), beer and other snacks and also employing the concept known in Japanese as hara hachi bu (speech dictation software picked that up as “hot a hottie”) which means eating until you feel about 80% full. Additionally, there’ll be 5 cups of green tea consumed throughout the day. There won’t be any special powders, electrified belts, booty jigglers (booty jigglers are making a comeback in Japan), or any other bizarre crap that the weight-loss industry is trying to convince you that you need to lose weight. In a nut shell, green tea diet = simple.

About Green Tea
In the Japanese language, words change depending on what state they’re in. Take the word rice for example, uncooked rice (kome) is different than cooked rice in a bowl (gohan) which is different than cooked rice on a plate (raisu). And so it goes the same for green tea in Japan. Most of the words used for green tea, early grades of quality of tea, while other words indicate how the tea was processed. The most commonly used tea however, is called sencha. Green tea also comes in many forms. You can get loose tea leaves, green tea in bags (think earl grey or lipton), or green tea as a power. In Japan, the most common type is loose tea leaves.

Left to right: Sencha, Genmaicha, Sencha, Houjicha, Sencha Center: Loose tea leaves (from bag)

Tea in Japan, is usually served in small cups that lack handles (I’ve been told that these cups lack handles so you can warm your hands on the cup) and is poured from a ceramic or porcelain teapot that has a lid, and a large handle protruding from the side. It’s important to note, that when you serve the tea, you’ll need to hold onto the lid to keep it from falling off. Again, if you hit up Wikipedia, you’ll find out that the recommended amount of tea to brew is 2 grams per 100 mL of water. The tea should then be steeped for two or three minutes. Living in Japan however, I can tell you that most Japanese people just dump in the tea from a premeasured scoop, fill the teapot with water from an electric kettle, serve the tea for everybody, refill the teapot with water and place it back on the table so everyone can have seconds. They don’t usually exchange the tea leaves but instead, get several brews. This also reduces the amount of caffeine per each subsequent pot which might be useful if you want to drink a cup before bedtime.

Green Tea Weight Loss Conclusion or Ice Cream Addiction Recovery in a Nutshell
Anyways, that’s the green tea weight loss challenge. To recap, drink 5 glasses of green tea throughout the day, and reduce the total amount of food consumed while getting some brisk, low-stress exercise. It doesn’t seem as life changing (think life upheaval) as joining a gym, or buying preprocessed “diet” foods at the grocery store and that’s why I think I can do this. If you’d like to try this, drop me a line and let me know how it goes.

I recently bought a Xooter Street and it’s one of the coolest, yet dorky, things I’ve ever bought. Now a kick scooter, has absolutely got to do with ice cream, and so for about a month, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a review about the scooter and tie it in with homemade ice cream. Maybe, it could be a mini ice cream truck or perhaps a great way to get to your favorite ice cream shop.

So why get a kick scooter? Well for one thing, if you live in the city, a real city and not a suburb, a kick scooter is super convenient. Were I live, in Japan, you don’t need a car at all. In a lot of reviews, the Xootr is contrasted against the bicycle, as a reason for buying. They say parking a bicycle is a hassle, having to wear special clothes is a hassle, and a myriad of other reasons why a scooter is better than a bicycle. Well that is flat out bologna, and that idea, comes more from a culture that sees the bicycle as either a toy, a hobby, or exercise equipment, rather than as an item of transportation. The truth is that you can ride to work in a full suit and not stink up the office, as long as you ride to work at a reasonable pace versus a racing pace. Where a scooter beats a bicycle, is for short distances, or where getting a bicycle out of storage and on to the street is more of a hassle than the time saved by the speed of the bike.

So what does that mean? Well for example, were I live is in an apartment building over a cram school. There are two choices for parking a bicycle. There’s bicycle parking located on the side of the building, or you can park your bicycle outside the door of your apartment. In America, it’s probably illegal due to fire regulations to park your bicycle in the entryway to your apartment building but in Japan, it’s not as regulated so that’s what a lot of people do. So to get your bicycle on the street, you must either fight your way in and out of an elevator, with the doors opening and closing on you as you’re trying to get in and out. Also, there’s only enough room in the elevator for you and your bicycle so anyone else waiting on the elevator will have to wait until you’ve offloaded your body before they can use elevator. The other option, is the bicycle parking but after about 4:00 PM, children start coming to the cram school by bicycle and so after about four o’clock it’s impossible to get your bicycle out of the parking. In this case, the scooter wins. You can write it from the front door of your apartment to the elevator; it goes into the elevator easily and you can write it right out of the elevator and on the street. For short distances, it’s also more efficient than the bicycle because a lot of the extra speed is wasted while waiting for stop lights.

The Xootr scooter is also better when you need to integrate with other forms of transportation. As an example, I own a bike Friday that I bought with the intention of bringing with me when I travel. The truth is however I have never used it for that purpose. It just seems like too much trouble to pack it into a suitcase to bring along. In Japan, cheap folding bikes abound and yet I’ve never seen a single one folded up. Xootr by the way does make a folding bicycle however, it appears to have all the problems of the bike Friday. now don’t get me w the bike Friday, is an excellent bike and I’m sure the zoo tour is to, it’s just that bicycles are convenient to take with you on a trip. On a side note, one of my fellow teachers packs kick scooter with him, whenever we have drinking parties.

So why the zoot or street? Well for one thing, being interested in electric vehicles, as well as human powered vehicles, I was already aware of the zoot or for most forms. Secondly, the street was touted as being a tank and when you weigh over 200 pounds like I do, being a tank is a good thing. The magnesium model for example has an advertised weight limit of 250 pounds, while the street, and incidentally all the other models, haven’t advertised weight limit of 300 pounds. Our streets and sidewalks, are terrible and so there was some worry about cracking the magnesium board. By the way, that 250 pound weight limit, is a lot higher than just about every other brand scooter on the market.

Riding the scooter is pretty easy and it was surprising to see how well the large wheels of the Zuber could navigate over obstacles like tram tracks and cobblestone sidewalks. To be honest, I was pretty sure I would be sending the visitor back because the wheels didn’t perform as advertised. But so far, it’s handled everything and I haven’t been thrown to the ground even one time yet. Knock on wood. I think also, that the design of the front fork, is largely responsible for the scooter’s ability to go over obstacles. It’s also a joy to use when you have to fold it up. One day, I rode the zoot or to the grocery store stepped off, collapse the handlebars, and folded the hinge, and have it slung over my shoulder in just a few seconds. An elderly man watching me set it sure is convenient as I went into the store. Another advantage, is that on a recent trip by ferry, to a nearby island, using the zoo here I was able to board the ferry and pay the lower passenger rate versus paying the near double rate for using a bicycle.

So what sucks about the zoot are? The sooner Street, looks and feels very solid, and there isn’t too much to complain about. With that said, the frame does flex quite a bit. I’m not sure if that’s a problem but it’s something I hadn’t expected. Also, because it flexes it creaks. The brake handle can also be pretty noisy but if you ride with your fingers on the lever, that cuts down the noise quite a bit. All in all, I think that’s about the worst thing I can say for the suitor is the noise. There are issues, that arise from using small solid wheels but these are really a trade-off for portability and efficiency and are really no fault of the suitor. These issues, are things like the terrible ride quality and extreme vibration felt when writing on very rough surfaces. Even larger wheels or pneumatic tires could fix this problem but then you would lose portability and efficiency.

I do have a couple issues though with the company sued her. Many people who have reviewed other kick scooters will say that the suitor is very expensive but very worth it. If this scooter were mass-produced in China, I would say that it is way overpriced, but in this case there are produced on medium scale in the United States so the price fits. The issue I have with the company however is that the price of the street is listed as $279, while the Roma is listed at $239, and the Venus is listed at $259. When looking at their website, they indicate that all models, with the exception of the magnesium model, share the same chassis and so the difference in price, depends on which deck you choose. However, if you look at their parts page all the decks are equally priced at $119.95. So if the chassis are the same, and the decks cost the same price why is the street $40 more expensive than the Roma?

In his book, Alton Brown’s Gear for Your Kitchen, Alton Brown says of old-fashioned ice cream makers, “Everyone loves ice cream, and the average American consumes more than 23 pints a year. Maybe that explains why people have put up with those hand-crank machines for the last 150 years, and why they remain popular despite the invention of electricity in the development of the electric ice cream machine.”  So today, I’m playing the side of the defense, and will be making the case for these old-timey devices. Here we’ll look a little into the history, some advantages and disadvantages, as well as how to get the most from your machine.

I believe the story goes, it was the Roman emperors, who had servants, passing blocks of ice from far away lands, to make some of the first ice cream’s. Fast forward a few hundred years, and we find in 1846, a patent for an invention to make ice cream created by a lady named Nancy Johnson. Hindsight is 2020 and so unfortunately she saw her patent to a local businessman who ended up getting rich. Now fast forward again another hundred and 50 or so years and we have the modern ice cream freezer, which uses a bowl that you put in your freezer. But today, many people still choose to use a hand powered machine; why is that?

The old-fashioned, hand powered ice cream freezer has quite a few disadvantages. For one thing, you need lots of ice and rock salt. They also have a reputation of being messy, with melted rock salt and ice slurry, leaking all over the place. All this, and you have to hand crank it for at least 20 or 30 minutes, before you end up with a bowl of dessert. Well, I’ll make the case here, that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. First, if you really love ice cream, then you’re going to watch a hand powered machine. You see when you crank the machine by hand, you receive feedback. More specifically, you can tell in the ice cream mixture is starting to freeze. That means, you can crank faster, and thus work more air into the ice cream. Air is essential to ice cream because without it, you basically have a cream popsicle. So air is responsible for the mouth feel. Another advantage is the amount of ice cream that you can make. Usually electric models, common one and ½ quart capacities. Hand powered models on the other hand usually come in four or 6 quart capacities, so if you need to make ice cream for a lot of people you either need a lot of electric machines, or a hand powered one. The third advantage, is because their hand powered, you can make ice cream anywhere. Want to go camping and have homemade ice cream? If you’re planning on using electric model, you need a generator, and a freezer. If you’re using a hand powered model, it’s a quick stop to the bait shop for some ice, whip up the mixture on your camping stove and voilà homemade ice cream in the middle of nowhere.

-As an aside, if you came to this page looking for a vintage ice cream maker manual this one for the white mountain ice cream freezer should help you out. I know there are many brands and such but a lot of them are pretty similar to the white mountain unit…anyways back to our regular scheduled broadcast…

Before, I mentioned some of the disadvantages of a hand powered ice cream maker. While here are some tips, that make those disadvantages a nonissue. So while you can’t reduce the amount of ice needed, bags of ice are very cheap and so I don’t think it really matters. If you’re going to the store, to get the ingredients for the ice cream mixture, you might as well pick up a couple bags of ice, and that goes for the rock salt to. About the mess, many of the old-fashioned machines, used a wooden outer buckets, that was made up of slats rather than a solid bowl. As the ice melts, it would leak between the slats. The simple solution, is to place the ice cream maker in a larger shallow dish, and use it in that. That way, the rock salt and ice slurry stays in the shallow dish and is easily discarded. Now about hand cranking, if you really can’t bring yourself to invest 20 or 30 minutes of manual labor into your favorite frozen dessert, there are electric motors that will do the work for you. However if your number one concern is about the quality of the ice cream you make, and you have children… or other family members, you might want to google the term division of labor. By that I mean, put all those freeloaders to work. Also, to make the ice cream maker more stable for hand cranking, my grandmother, would place a towel over the machine, and have my little brother sit on it while we would take turns cranking it. If you decide to use this tip, I want to point out that my little brother was fairly light at the time, perhaps no more than about 25 pounds or so. I don’t want to be responsible if 250 pound, uncle Bob, sits on your machine.

By now, you’re probably wondering, where can I buy an old-fashioned ice cream maker? If you’re dead set on a new machine, you pretty much have one choice: the White Mountain ice cream freezer company, now owned by rival, is about the only company making a machine of reasonable quality. These machines can be quite expensive, usually running around $200 or so. Because they last so long though, I don’t really think price is so much of a consideration. Antique machines on the other hand, are still quite usable and affordable on many of the auction sites. If you choose to go this route, please take caution. Before buying, you’ll want to know if the seller has a good reputation and also if the machine is working or not. Also make sure that there are good photos and don’t hesitate to ask the seller for more photos. If the seller doesn’t answer your questions or is hesitant to send more photos, that’s a clue that you should probably look at a different machine. On the other hand, the vintage machines are usually built to a much higher standard. And by vintage, I’m talking about machines from the 50s 60s and 70s. Finally, you want to make sure that your machine comes with all the parts that it’s supposed to have. If the seller doesn’t know, find a different seller.

Hopefully by now, you’ve been persuaded that a hand powered/old-fashioned ice cream machine is a worthy investment. Their advantages outweigh the disadvantages and there are very simple workarounds for the disadvantages. Finally, I’m going to leave you with a couple of thoughts, that are really meant to be philosophic. It sounds kind of heavy for ice cream doesn’t it? It seems that this day and age, everyone is looking for a way to do everything a little faster and a little cheaper. A little faster and a little cheaper, in my mind, is just another way of saying a diluted experience. It’s a lot easier, to dump your ingredients into an electric machine, and go back into the living room and watch TV. In this scenario, it’s hard to imagine ice cream as the treat is supposed to be —- a long time ago only nobility could even get it. To close, I want to leave you with a quote from one of my favorite books, One Man’s Wilderness. “Eight and a half miles can be covered in minutes with a car on an expressway, but what does a man see? What he gains in time he loses in benefit to his body and mind.”

photo credit: Mdrewe

I ran across something interesting in the New York times today that seemed like with a little bit of work, could be replicated at home and would be a cool feature at say a Halloween party. Perhaps you could churn up some pumpkin and chocolate chip ice cream with a bit of alchemy flair. The idea comes from Lulu & Mooky’s a New York ice cream shop that whips up their homemade ice cream with little bit of added flair. Rather than using a traditional ice cream maker, they use a KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment and get this liquid nitrogen. So for Mr Tapper and Ram Chhetri, the store’s owners, rock salt and ice isn’t good enough. They instead go all Bill Nye the Science Guy on their favorite frosty treat.  And it’s this novel application of science that, in my mind, would make this worth playing around with as a center piece for a Halloween party. Just imagine, the smoky cauldron, maybe you serve it in little carved out pumpkins or shrunken heads.

So going along on that theme, I thought it be kinda cool to find other ways to work homemade ice cream into your halloween. Some things are probably rather obvious like ice cream cakes and such. But with a melon baller or an ice cream scoop, also called a disher, a very well rounded single scoop of vanilla ice cream drizzled with a little raspberry sauce  and topped with a blue, green, or brown, or any other color for that matter, M&M and a tiny drop of melted dark chocolate for the pupil makes for a really creepy and yummy disembodied eye.

Maybe step it up a notch and make a bloody vanilla ice cream eye and orange juice float. To do that, mix in equal proportions orange juice and pinapple juice drop in your ice cream eye and drizzle the raspberry sauces over the eye and around the rim of the glass so that the raspberry sauce runs down the inside of the glass.

Or if you know someone who is pregnant and your thinking about baby shower ideas that fit the theme of the season. Well personally, I can think of nothing scarier than some of the things that women crave during pregnancy…. now don’t get mad at me! My wife was quite sexy when she was pregnant and I have a beautiful daughter because of it. I’m just saying that some of the combinations my wife came up with could make for a good Halloween-themed baby shower. Nope, not pickles and ice cream but Natto and raw eggs and ice cream. And if you don’t know what Natto is, Google it–it’s the living dead of fermented soy products.

You could also let everyone make their own ice cream using plastic ziplock bags. All you need for that is ice, rock salt or other salt, 1/2 milk or cream, 1 tbsp sugar, and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Just like the old timey ice cream makers, the rock salt goes into the big outer Ziplock bag until half full. Toss in the salt as well and add the other stuff to the inner bag. Seal everything up real tight and start shaking the bajeezus out it. After about 5 minutes, you should have ice cream in the inner bag. Because you just eat it straight out of the bag there’s almost no cleanup.

You can probably guess from the name of the website that I favor home made ice cream and it seems that now, I have  a really good reason as it turns out that store-bought ice cream can kill you! Ok maybe that was a bit drastic but it could be true. I was reading the news headlines in Google today and ran across a recall of the Dove Ice Cream Company’s product, Carmel Pecan Perfection which sound like a heavenly name and it’ll certainly get you there if you’re allergic to peanuts. According to newspaper, The Daily Citizen, as submitted by the Georgia Department of Agriculture, there was one batch of ice cream, lot number 931AB5YN07, that got made with an additional ingredient not listed on the ingredients label: peanuts.  From the newspaper article:

Dove Caramel Pecan Perfection is sold in a brown and gold 15.10 fl. oz. pint container and pictures a ribbon of caramel, pecans and a square of Dove Brand Chocolate on the front.
This recall is limited to one specific lot number (931AB5YN07). The recalled ice cream was distributed in the following states: Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.
Consumers who have purchased this recalled ice cream may return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. Consumers with questions may call the company’s toll-free number: 1-800-551-0895 between 8:30 AM and 5:00 PM Monday – Friday.

So for heaven’s sake if you have someone in your family who loves ice cream and who has an allergy to peanuts let em know so they don’t end up int the ER.

The incident also made me think about what other ice cream catastrophes have happened in the past. Breyer’s, the ice cream giant has had similar problems in the past with unintended ingredients ending up in its products; the most recent being a recall involving wheat inadvertently sneaking its way in.

Fox news source lists ice cream as number six on it’s list of foods that possibly cause food poisoning. They go on to cite salmonella from raw eggs as the biggest reason. I say if your making homemade ice cream and using high-quality fresh eggs and you have a strong immune system, there’s no reason to ninny about salmonella. They also list another factor but one that is probably almost universal to mass-produced ice cream and that’s listeria to which they list soft-serve ice cream machines as the source. I’d say you could probably throw E. coli OH7:157 in as well with the lack of hand washing after doing number two that goes on in your local ice cream shop.

Another danger of mass-produced ice cream is that it really brings out the sickos. Sickos like a Kansas City man who spiked ice cream with roofies so that he could make semi-nude photos of little girls. Although the article doesn’t say that it was specifically mass-produced ice cream, it’s pretty safe to say he wasn’t making his own. But I will admit that although not likely, a sick pervert could use homemade ice cream to some nefarious end.

In conclusion, making your ice cream really is better. Maybe it’s not much healthier but since you decide what goes into it you can make it better for you. You’ll also never face the problem of having to worry about anaphylactic shock which is what you get when you eat something you’re allergic to or get stung by something your allergic to. I will give one more reason which I would back up with a photo but I’m not so sure about Japan’s laws on taking public photos so I won’t but you never know under what conditions mass-produced ice cream is being made. I used to ride by a local ice cream plant on my way to work. I say ride because I use a bicycle. The commute took me over a sky-bridge over the ice cream factory and between the dingy look of the building (not at all like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory) and the smell, I gave up on eating Japanese ice cream. Yuck!

I own Ben and Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and Dessert Book,  a manual of sorts, on how to make ice cream and other ice cream desserts (ice cream cake anyone?) at home. The book is a collaboration of sorts between Ben and Jerry of course, and with the help of magazine and newspaper writer Nancy Steven. Now before I get into the review, I must preface my review with three statements. One, I have not tried every recipe in the book. I am partial to certain flavors of ice cream and ones that I won’t normally buy at the store, I didn’t make. Two, I have never had Ben and Jerry’s commercial ice cream so I can’t make any comparison to how close it is to what you get in a retail spot. Finally,  I really like this book so in an attempt to make this review balanced, versus me glowing over everything, I’ve taken a look at some of the negative reviews from Amazon and paraphrased them here. Ok so let’s get to the review shall we.

The book is divided pretty logically with a bit of a preface, which is really the story of Ben and Jerry, followed by some ice cream theory by Jerry. The theory part reads a little bit like those famous words of Chef Gusteau, from the movie Ratatouille, “Any one can cook.” Except replace cook with make ice cream and instead of one simple line, it’s more like two rules. Rule 2 is, “There’s no such thing as an unredeemingly bad batch of homemade ice cream,” which I agree for the most part is true as long as you start out with the coldest ingredients possible or a compressor style ice cream maker.

The book itself is pretty cool with very retro-looking numbers that give the book the feel that it was designed by the Children’s Television Workshop, those same folks that make Sesame Street, I could hear The Count, every time I heard the page.

Now for the recipes. The recipes I tried was what the call the Heath Bar Crunch, which is a favorite of mine, Oreo Mint, Peanut Butter Fudge Swirl, and the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. All of the recipes were easy enough to make, meaning the instructions were well written and none of the ingredients were overly exotic (very important if you don’t live in America). I thought all of the recipes tasted really good as did my wife and children. The Heath Bar Crunch recipe is a bit different than the one from my grandma and to be honest I think hers is better but can you honestly take my word for it? One thing to note about the Heath Bar Crunch recipe is that they go into a lot of detail about how to break the Heath candy bars. In reality, it’s not that difficult. We’ve alway just put the Heath bars in the freezer for a few hours and then without even opening the package just crumble them up like you do with saltine crackers you want to spread over chili.

Now about the negative reviews: The biggest complaint people had with this book is about raw eggs. All I can say to that is GET A GRIP! Some of the best foods in the world use eggs that are in less than a hard-boiled state. Caesar Salad uses a one-minute boiled egg, and what about eggs sunny side up? Real pasta carbonara, real mayonnaise, steak tartare is raw ground meat with a raw egg on top, not to mention sushi, or rare steaks. Here in Japan, I ate raw chicken and I’m still alive! Get rid of the germophobia and live a little. But still if you’re too much of a wus, just get pasteurized eggs. Finally, I read about a couple of people making scrambled eggs in some of the heated recipes. What you need to do, is a process called tempering. What that means is that before you add eggs to a hot liquid, you need to raise the temperature of the eggs enough so that they won’t curdle. You do that by adding in small increments of the hot mixture to the eggs before adding the eggs into the mixture. Doing that will prevent your eggs from scrambling.

Overall, I like Ben and Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and Dessert Book. Like I said, I didn’t try every recipe but the ones that I did try tasted great. So while the book isn’t super comprehensive, it does contain some unique recipes that my family gets a craving for every once in a while. So with that said, I think you’ll probably enjoy it as well.

photo credit: eyeliam

Summer time equals cold treats like ice cream and popsicles, but if your trying to save money because of the depression, an ice cream maker might just be the ticket. But how do ice cream makers work?
An ice cream makers also known as ice cream machines and ice cream freezers all pretty much work the same way–an ice cream mixture is brought to the freezing point and at the same time, the mixture is stirred to keep ice from forming.
While there are many styles of ice cream machines, choosing one can be a little difficult. Here are some of the basic types.
The first and oldest type of ice cream maker is also the most simple. By that, I’m talking about the hand powered ice cream maker. With a hand cranked ice cream makers, there is an outer “bucket” and an inner chamber. Rock salt and ice go into the outer bucket and your ice cream mix goes into the inner chamber. All the mixing is done by you, via a hand crank which operates the stirrers in the chamber.
While a hand powered ice cream maker requires the most work, usually around 20 or 30 minutes of hand mixing,  ice cream lovers claim that these ice cream makers make the best ice cream. But if all that sounds like too much work, an electric ice cream maker can replace the human-powered stirring with an electric motor. White Mountain Freezer Company is one of the better brands for both hand cranked and electric powered ice cream makers.
The second type kind of ice cream machine is more modern and also takes a bit less work. And while quite similar in appearance to the electric models mentioned above they differ in the way they achieve their “chill.” Instead of using rock salt and ice, these ice cream makers use a a double walled container that has refrigerant between the two walls. Before use, the container must be placed in the freezer for about a day or overnight, to lower the temperature of the coolant to below freezing. If you’re shopping for this kind of ice cream maker, look for brands like Cuisinart and Krups.
The last type, called an ice cream freezer, is bigger and more expensive than the two other types of ice cream machines, but if you make lots of homemade ice cream, it may be worth the expense. Again these work using the same idea as the hand powered models but again these differ in how the ice cream mix is chilled. Basically an ice cream freezer has a built-in fridge that does takes care of chilling your ice cream mixture.
Some models come with a mixing bowl that can’t be removed which makes cleaning hard. So you might want to take that into consideration when buying.
Besides being affordable and fun, an ice cream maker lets you control the ingredients of the  ice cream. And making homemade ice cream can bring the whole family together, at least it did in my house growing up. Still today, I have many wonderful memories of cutting up Snickers bars and watching my grandma make us homemade ice cream.

photo credit: love･janine

Well now that summer’s almost comming to an end, I thought about sharing something that brought me a lot of joy as a child and that’s homemade Heath candy bar ice cream. So today here is my Grandma’s homemade Heath candy bar ice cream recipe.

Ingredients:

How to Make It:
First crumble up the Heath Bars, still in the wrapper, and dump into a bowl. Next, in a heavy sauce pan, combine the cream, milk, sugar and lightly wisk together until all ingredients are combined and almost to a boil. In a separate bowl give the egg yolks a good mixing with a fork. Then it’s time to temper the egg. This is very important so don’t skip this step! You are going to add, at about half a tablespoon at a time the hot cream/milk/sugar mixture to the egg yolk. If you just dump the egg into the hot mixture, you’re going to have scrambled eggs in your ice cream and you do not want that. So by adding small amounts of the hot liquid to the egg yolk, we are gradually raising the temp of the eggs so they can be added to the hot liquid and be incorporated rather than scrambled. After about a cup of the hot mixture have been added to the egg yolk, you can mix the egg yolk into the hot liquid and reduce over low heat. That means low heat, no lid and slowly mix until enough water has evaporated out of the mix, that it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. You can also toss in the vanilla extract at the same time as the eggs. When the liquid is thick enough, it’s time to chill the mixture.
To chill the mixture use a water bath, which is basically a bowl filled with water and ice, and a second bowl containing the ice cream mixture that is set down into the first bowl. The first bowl, can be anything, an ice chest, your sink, another mixing bowl, but for the second bowl, I recommend a stainless mixing bowl, which will allow the ice cream mix to cool as quickly as possible. Just make sure that none of the water from the first bowl gets into the ice cream mix. After the mix is around room temp, cover the ice cream mix, and place it in a very cold fridge for at least an hour, longer if you can stand it. It’s a good idea to do the same with the Heath bars too. The colder your ingredients are when you start to make ice cream, the better success you’ll have, especially if your using a canister style ice cream maker.
Once your ingredients are properly chilled, make the ice cream according to your ice cream machine’s instructions. When the ice cream mix starts to thicken, easy to tell on a hand cranked ice cream freezer, add the Heath candy bars. And one final note, I’d leave the Heath bars in the fridge until right before I was ready to add them but if you are using a hand powered machine, send someone to get them, don’t stop cranking.
So hopefully, you’ll find this recipe for homemade Heath candy bar ice cream, as delicious as my family and I have. And if you make a batch, let me know how it turns out.