Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Is there anything you could use as a substitute for rock salt when making ice cream?

ice cream rock salt
 on Ingredients for Pistachio Ice Cream
ice cream rock salt image



Cayley


I went to buy some rock salt yesterday but I saw that it was $20... I thought that was a bit ridiculous, you could probably buy gallons of ice cream for that much. Is regular salt that expensive?
Anyway, I was wondering if there was a more affordable way to make your own ice cream?



Answer
This page explains why rock salt is better than table salt, though both will work:
http://www.ehow.com/about_6639256_add-salt-ice-ice-cream_.html

I don't know how much ice cream can be made with $20 of salt, but many people just buy an ice cream maker so they never need to buy salt (....and don't have to do the shaking/mixing themselves). Not sure how much the cost of salt over time would pay for an ice cream maker.
Cuisinart makes one of the best and most commonly available ones (for about $50) --so salt never needed, just a tad of electricity: http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-ICE-20-Automatic-2-Quart-Ice-Cream/dp/B00000JGRT

(Most people just make small amounts of homemade ice cream at one time though which doesn't require a lot of salt, unless they have a large hand-cranked ice cream maker:
http://www.google.com/images?q=how+to+make+homemade+ice+cream+salt
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+make+homemade+ice+cream+salt )

You could also switch to making sorbet (with or without a machine) and then not need salt either:
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+make+sorbet++-machine

The purpose of making any of these yourself is not really to save money (especially compared to cheap ice creams, etc), but to use only the ingredients and amounts of them you want, not use additives/gels/etc, and be able to make any flavor you can dream up in a half hour or so, or in a few hrs for "hard" ice cream.



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