Ben & Jerrys Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book

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Product Reviews

(4 stars) - Good book

The receipes in this book are real easy to understand and use and for everyone I have tried has turned out real well. After using this book you will learn to experiment on your own.

(5 stars) - The Way to "Roundness"
I had the Hamilton Beach Ice Cream maker and the Ben and Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream and dessert book sent directly to our son, daughter-in-law and two grandgirls in Denver. They report that Dad now looks like a bowling ball, Mom almost matches Dad and the wee girls just roll along. I think that may well be a bit of an exaggeration. Nonetheless I think it's a wonderful metaphor for the enjoyment they have found in these two products. Thank you, Amazon, for your speedy and careful handling of these well received gifts!

(4 stars) - Great buy
Great little book to start ice cream making with. The intro is mostly biography, there is a section to better understand ice cream making (key ingredients, why you need to use whole milk as opposed to fat free, etc), and the rest of the book is recipes. They have great techniques, but they are often in sidebars, rather than being on a separate page or chapter. As far as the recipes go, it is great- they have different ice cream bases, and suggest in each recipe which base works best for flavor. They also have recipes for sorbets, toppings (fudge, caramel, etc), and other desserts that can be used as add ins (brownies, blondies, etc). It also, obviously, doesn't talk about frozen yogurt. My only problem is that it isn't quite as organized as I would like to get to a specific technique, like adding a fudge swirl to an ice cream. Great buy.

(4 stars) - Very good ice cream recipes
The ice cream recipes are very good, especially the strawberry ice cream recipe. As for the baking section, I've tried the chocolate chip cookies which were very good! But, I also tried the brownie layer ice cream cake which came out terribly wrong. As someone said earlier, the proportions were all wrong, majorly. We had to end up eating the brownie cake layers by themselves which were very thick and rich. It didn't end up working out as an ice cream cake at all. I was very disappointed! Especially since it was supposed to be a birthday cake.

(4 stars) - Great Primer on Ice Cream
This book is inspirational and informative, in a chatty, casual style that, while it makes the book fun to read, can sometimes lean toward too casual for my tastes. So I will tell you upfront the one gripe I have with the Ben & Jerry's book: it is vague about a topic I think is very important: cooking of ingredients. In particular, there are three basic "sweet cream" recipes (pg 28-9) in the book. The first describes a cream that uses eggs, cream, milk, and sugar, mixed together in a bowl. In the second recipe, however, Ben & Jerry point out that this number 2 recipe is easy because it doesn't involve any cooking, and sort of imply that also because of the lack of cooking (and/or the lack of eggs), the 2nd recipe won't last long in the freezer. So okay, did the first recipe involve cooking and we forgot to mention it? Or do none of the recipes involve cooking, and do we then assume that none of them will last long in the freezer? The authors have introduced a smoking gun in act two, when nothing was fired onstage in act one.

That said, I still really like this book for the discussion of basic ice cream properties. In fact, I wish that discussion went into a little more detail. (Maybe I really need the Harold McGee ice cream book, if there was such a thing). And if you like crazy, wild, and inspiring ice cream recipes, Ben & Jerry are famous for them for a reason, and you will find those recipes in abundance here.

So overall, I give this book a high rating for its basic info content and its wild ice cream chemistry tips and techniques, but a star off for some vagueness.

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