Peanut Butter Ice Cream

I got an automatic ice cream machine as a graduation gift recently and, because it’s so easy, I’ve been making tons of the stuff. All thats involved is whipping together a mix, tossing it into the bucket and turning the dial; no need to fool with ice and because it’s compressor-driven, you can create one batch right after the other without needing multiple frozen cores. This allows me to easily create a number of slightly different mixes in order to find the best possible recipe for a superb ice cream. Everyone loved a peanut butter flavored masterpiece I made a few weeks ago, so I figured that’d be a good thing to start with.

I made three batches as follows; each batch contained a couple of tablespoons of vanilla in addition to that listed below:

Peanut butter	Sugar	Light cream	Skim milk	Skim milk Powder
½ cup	¼ cup	½ cup	½ cup	-
½ cup	¼ cup	¾ cup	¾ cup	-
½ cup	¼ cup	¾ cup	¾ cup	¼ cup

All of these were very good. The one with equal amounts of peanut butter and the two milk products was perhaps a little bit too much like eating gobs of peanut butter; the other two were much more like actual ice cream. Skim milk powder, often an ingredient in ice cream recipes, is the only difference between the two with more milk and it had a small but beneficial effect. I think it would work best to have a 2:1 ratio of total liquid milk (cream & milk) to milk powder; ¾ cup would be better than the ¼ cup I used, in this case. All of the ice creams were sweet enough, in my opinion, and perfectly creamy, due in large part to the fat of the peanut butter. I tend to make fairly lean ice creams, so if you want something even more luscious, which seems to be how most ice cream recipes are written, go with whole milk instead of skim or use a heavier cream.