Introduction

None of us editors at Food52 run an ice cream shop. We don’t have professional-grade ice cream makers or freezers. We are not named Ben or Jerry, but, like you, we adore ice cream. And while we happily eat ice cream from the store, we know that ice cream made at home is better—its consistency pillowy, its flavor pronounced, its style up to us.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find recipes for ice cream, sure—they range from the best versions of classics to the strange yet good—but you’ll also find sorbet, sherbet, slushies, semifreddo, sandwiches, milkshakes, sundaes, splits, and shaved ice. Gelato, granita, frozen yogurt, frozen custard, cremolada, cake, and velvet, too. There’s ice milk, coolers, and floats, plus tacos, pies, pops, and paletas. There’s even something called spoom, which might be our favorite of all—and there are probably others we forgot.

When you consider that frozen desserts can be made weeks in advance, be kept on hand for whenever, and can morph into a zillion other sweets, it’s easy to run to your ice cream maker and jump in to the recipes. But it can also be a little daunting: Ice cream, like baking, is a science. To do it well, it helps to have a good recipe (or sixty) in your back pocket and to know what to do if things go awry.

The contributors whose recipes are featured here have made a lot of ice cream, and they don’t run adorable ice cream shops either. They’re home cooks who really like ice cream and who have learned how to make it well in their own kitchens. Their ice cream maker model might be the same as yours, and they know tempered eggs can get a little scrambled at times. They also have some pretty ingenious ideas in the flavor department.

Half of the recipes here are beloved by the Food52 community and have been made by many over and over. The other half are new, created by longtime Food52 contributor Cristina Sciarra. We knew she was a writer and cook with a day job in real estate development, but only after she signed on to dream up ice creams for this book did we learn that she also went to ice cream school—for fun ! (I saw her study guide; there are a lot of numbers.) Her ice cream recipes are fail-proof, but—just as important—they taste good. Cristina knows that black pepper feta ice cream isn’t too wild for reality, and that beer ice cream is the update that mud pies of yesteryear always needed.

But back to the scary part. With Cristina’s help, and the smarts of our community, we’ve sprinkled tips throughout the book to help answer the questions you’ve always wondered about: What exactly is skim milk powder? My base curdled—what now?

There are also Genius tips, based on the Food52 series and (ahem, New York Times best-selling) book Genius Recipes , in which Food52 creative director Kristen Miglore unearths recipes from food luminaries that are so smart, they’ve changed the way we cook. These tips and ideas add to the collective brainpower found in these pages.

With its recipes and tips and practical science and ideas, we hope that this cookbook gives you really delicious ice cream. But also consider it permission to play. After all, an ice cream swirl is really just edible spin art. Once you know the ropes—and that you can make no-churn ice cream in any flavor (this page )—why listen to us?

—Ali Slagle, books editor of Food52