Ice creams, by Kendall Melton

Kendall makes ice creams using the Anglaise method: tempering a milk/cream/flavorings mixture into a heated yolk/sugar/salt mixture. There's a Philadelphia, or "American" style that doesn't use eggs, and there's the "cheap supermarket" style that uses lots of cornstarch and stabilizers and whips a lot of air into the mixture to make it fluffier and cheaper.

Today, she's making the Chocolate Almond Toffee and Toasted Coconut with Shiso ice creams.

For each, she combines and whisks sugar, salt, and egg yolks in a dry metal bowl. There can't be any water at all in the bowl, and she has to start quickly, lest the sugar cook the eggs. It is unclear why it is sitting on a scale in the photo on the right, as there is no need to weigh the mixture.

Meanwhile, she's scalding a "base" of milk and cream in a saucepan. The base contains all the flavorings for the ice cream, besides garnishes or desirable solids that might fall apart during cooking (e.g. toffee, chcolate chips, cake crumbs). "I don't like to make any base without some sort of vanilla in it," Kendall says. If you wanted to use something else, Kendall recommends lemon or orange zest, pine nuts, or mint marigold.

Once the base has steeped, she combines it with the yolk mixture, and returns that to the saucepan.

It can take a while for the base to steep, and for the combined mixture to cook. "A lot of people really babysit ice creams," Kendall says, "and just stand here the whole time. I don't, but that's also because I have other things to do."

You can tell the custard is finished when small bubbles form along the side of the pan, as in the photo above right. Or, if it's thick enough that you can make a clean line by running your finger along the stirring spoon, then it's also done.

The next step is to strain the custard into an ice bath. The chinois shown is the only strainer that's fine enough to hold back all the undesirable solids. She covers the strained custards with food wrap, which needs to touch the top of the custard or a film will form, wasting product.

Once it's cold, it's still very liquid, but can be run in the machine. Different flavors are pictured below. Each batch yields 3.5-4 quarts of ice cream, or about 15-17 servings.

Certain flavors change the preparation method. Cinnamon roll ice cream, which used leftover brunch rolls steeped in cream, required fewer egg yolks. Salted caramel, a popular flavor that you may have had guests ask about, was an especially time-consuming one to make because of the base, and probably won't reappear until she can figure out a different base for it.

Things go wrong "all the time." Sorbets are especially difficult because the sugar content of the fruit varies, and it's hard to know how much sugar to add. Too little and it won't taste right, too much and the sorbet won't freeze.

Along with breads, Kendall considers ice creams the toughest thing to make in the home kitchen. But they are also her "absolute favorite thing to do, one thing I love more than anything else."