Three favorite food groups in ice cream form. Yes! If you’ve ever made homemade coffee ice cream, you know why we get so excited about it. It’s like an ice cream latte—smooth, rich, creamy—but you get to pick the coffee. In my case, I use decaf beans because otherwise I’m bouncing off the walls for days. Bump it up with some chocolate chips, douse it with a little smoky bourbon whisky, and hello, this is an ice cream dressed for a party. Why the bourbon? Of course you can skip it if for some reason you don’t want to use it. But consider this, there’s just enough in the recipe to give the ice cream a hint of bourbon flavor, and the addition of 40 proof alcohol will help keep your homemade ice cream from turning hard as stone in a day. Homemade ice creams don’t have the emulsifiers that you find in commercial ice creams, so they tend to stiffen up pretty quickly unless you add some alcohol or a lot of corn syrup to the ice cream base. (Add too much alcohol and your ice cream will never firm up, but you’ll have some pretty tasty soft serve!) After the beans have steeped in the hot milk cream mixture for an hour, strain the mixture and discard the beans.
