Pumpkin Ice Cream, from Scratch.

An ice cream maker is ideal, but not required.

     This ice cream will not be overly sweet nor overly spiced. The flavor of the pumpkin is allowed to come to the forefront. This formula yields a modest serving for about six people, though you can scale everything up in equal proportions for more. Lactose intolerant people might find this reasonably digestible.

Ingredients

-12 oz by weight fresh skinned pumpkin or orange squash, such as calabaza or butternut squash (about half a medium butternut). Remove the seeds and scrape the dangly internal fibers off with the side of a spoon and cut into chunks. 

-3/4 cup Heavy cream 

-3/4 cup oat milk or whole milk. Why oat milk? It has no lactose. By the way, Heavy Cream has very little lactose if at all. This is why lactose intolerant people can usually get away with cheese and butter.  

-1/4 tsp vanilla extract 

-ONE, just one, whole clove 

-ONE, just one, green cardamom pod, lightly pressed so the shell is open, but do not grind. 

-ONE and only one allspice berry, lightly split (put it under a towel and give it one tap with something heavy) 

-A pinch of salt

 -One cup white or turbinado sugar 

-4 egg yolks 

 Procedure 

     Steam the pumpkin or squash until very soft all the way through (check it every few minutes). Mine took about twenty minutes.

    

    While the pumpkin is steaming, heat the cream, milk, sugar, vanilla extract and spices in a pot at around medium low. You want it hot but not boiling. Stir frequently, almost continuously, so that it doesn't burn on the pan or form a skin on top. 

    

    Once the aroma of the spices is infused in the dairy, take it off the heat and strain it onto a separate bowl through a fine mesh colander to remove the spice bits. If you don't have a fine mesh wire strainer, try to fish out the spice chunks as best you can. Let the hot milk cool slightly so it doesn't melt your blender. 

    Meanwhile, allow the pumpkin to also cool slightly then place in the blender. Add just enough of the milk to it so that the blender can liquefy the pumpkin. You don't need to dump all the dairy in the blender. Once you've got all the pumpkin very well liquefied, add it to the dairy and all goes in the pot. If you have one of those minuscule, fancy $300 blenders you might have to work in batches. If you have an expensive blender but not a $7.99 fine mesh strainer, have fun fishing out the spice bits. 

    Now that you have all the pumpkin liquefied, combine everything: the pumpkin puree and the spiced sweet milk- it all goes back to the pot. Bring it to just hot once again (not boiling). Your dial should be between low and medium low on your smallest burner.

    Get your four eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. Don't throw away the whites! You can make lots of things with egg whites: merengues, pisco sours, or an egg white omelette. I prefer Pisco. 

    

    Beat the four egg yolks in a separate little bowl, and prepare for the fun part. If you've never done this before, this is called Tempering, something I distinctly lack. Tempering is a great skill because it's the basic procedure of all custards and many other recipes besides. Here it is:

    Add just a little spoonful of the hot dairy/pumpkin mixture to the little bowl that has your beaten yolks in it. Stir gently. You should feel the yolk mixture warm slightly. Repeat the process once or twice more: add a spoonful of the hot milk to the yolks, and gently stir. 

    What you're doing is bringing up the temperature of the yolks and sort of cushioning its proteins and emulsifiers so that when you add the yolks back to the pot of hot milk they don't turn into scrambled eggs. So once you've incorporated a portion of the hot milk into the yolks from the step in the above paragraph, the now warmed yolks are ready for the next step. 

    Begin slowly stirring the pot of hot milk/pumpkin now, and gently pour your yolk mixture into it in a thin stream, keep stirring slowly, almost lazily. Keep stirring it on very low heat. You'll note that it will gradually thicken. Once it thickens enough that it can coat the back of a spoon, it's finished. Usually it takes around ten minutes. You'll have to stir for most of those ten minutes so plan accordingly. 

    Transfer to a glass or steel bowl, cover it with a towel and let it cool on your countertop. Once it's cool, cover it with an impermeable lid (such as plastic wrap) and chill it in the fridge for several hours or overnight. It should be well chilled.

    If you have an ice cream maker, follow the manufacturer's instructions. Usually, it will ask you to chill your mixture, which you've already done. This completes your ice cream if you're using the maker.

    If you do not have an ice cream maker, place your chilled mixture in the freezer now. About every 20 or 30 minutes, take it out of the freezer and stir it vigorously. The stirring will incorporate some air into the cream (which is how ice cream machines work). This air is what gives ice cream its soft texture. You may have to do this for several hours, but you can just stop when you think it's good. It won't come out quite as soft as with the machine if done by hand; the texture will be denser, like gelatto. Not a bad thing, either.