The Crooked and the Straight

My latest foray into the world of cooking is ice cream. Food Network recently replayed the Good Eats episode "Churn Baby Churn, 2", which details the making of french-style ice cream. (French-style is made with eggs; it is essentially a frozen custard. Philadephia-style is made without eggs.)

Since this is my first time ever trying to make ice cream, I wound up making two batches: one of mint chip, and one of vanilla. I made two because the odds are good that I will screw up one of them.

The only wrinkle I ran into was that I couldn't find peppermint oil. I was able to get peppermint extract, but the conversion necessary to achieve equivalent potency was not clear. The vanilla recipe calls for two tablespoons of the vanilla extract flavorant, and the mint chip calls for one teaspoon of the peppermint oil flavorant. Since I at least know that oils are much more potent than extracts (owing to their lack of alcohol and higher concentration of flavor compounds), I just took a guess that 2T of extract == 1t of oil.

We'll see how things come out. The primordial ice cream batches are cooling overnight in my fridge. They smell sufficiently vanilla-y and minty, so that's a good sign I guess.

Of course, I needed to be able to differentiate between the batches, since they look exactly the same. Since the mint chip batch is flavored with peppermint, I labeled it "P". The other batch I labeled "NP".