Hand-Crank Ice Cream for Cranks

Step 2 Put the mixture into the churn

Once your ingredients are mixed you can pour everything into the quart container. I like to mix the milk in once the rest of the ingredients have been poured because otherwise it's sloshy and harder to move.

From seventh grade science you'll remember that water (and milk is a water-based liquid) expands as it freezes. In a container the size I have I leave about four inches of space between the ingredients and the lid because otherwise your ice cream mixture will slush out of the top as it gets cold.

Here we have the inside of the ice cream churn. This is a White Mountain Triple Motion churn. The wooden dashers move against the inside of the quart container and scrape the sides, and then the inner bit just stays still while everything else moves around it. All of these pieces together conspire to push the milky creamy stuff around and get it all cold and frozen evenly.

The hand-crank ice cream churn was first patented in 1843 by an American woman named Nancy Johnson. There have been modification since then, but as a girl working in a company of male engineers I have to give props to ol' Nancy for coming up with a radical improvement over the old method, which was called the pot-freezer method (a bowl of ice cream mixture inside another bowl with salty ice inside). The hand crank works faster and makes smoother ice cream than the pot-freezer method.