Icecream in a hurry, without an icecream maker

This was one of those things that goes around Facebook.  I mostly ignore them, but this one caught my eye.  Ice cream in a bag.

We’ve debated getting an ice cream maker but for various reasons haven’t, among others, would we really use it enough to make it worth while?

But at the same time there are times when I want ice cream and we don’t have any in the house, and I don’t want to run out to get some.  Plus some of the store bought stuff is less than stellar…….

Ice Cream In a Bag

1-quart sized ziplock

In it put:

1 cup of cream (or half and half, or even regular milk according to the comments on the recipe)

2 tablespoons of sugar

1/2 tsp of vanilla extract (or flavor of your choice)

seal the small ziplock (squeeze the air out best you can) and put it in:

1-gallon sized ziplock bag (I recommend a freezer bag, they’re sturdier)

with enough ice to half fill said bag (took about 2.5 trays for me) and

1/2 cup of salt (rock or other “chunky” salt works best, but I understand table salt works too)

Seal the gallon ziplock (you don’t actually want to squeeze all the air out, just some of it) and “shake it for 5 minutes”.  Since my hands are cold sensitive I basically just kept flipping it over and over and over.

At the end of 5 minutes pull the smaller bag out and rinse off the salt (don’t forget inside the lips of the seal!), I found it to be a bit soft to my taste for ice cream, but that’s probably perfect if you want to mix in chocolate chips or something.  Pour them into the ice cream back, seal it back up, and squish it around to mix them in.  I then put the ice cream bag into the freezer for 5 minutes while I cleaned up the mess from the ice, and refilled the trays.  After that point it was almost perfect, a bit firmer than soft-serve but not truly hard ice cream.