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Let's ask the FDA (Food & Drug Administration). They tell us that:
Ice cream is a food produced by freezing while stirring and that in order
to be called ice cream, a product must contain all of the following:

•  more than 10% butterfat
•  9-12% milk solids (casein, whey, lactose)
•  12-16% sweeteners (corn syrup, sugar)
•  0.2-0.5% stabilizers and emulsifiers
•  55-64% water

For the purposes of this document, we're going to assume that we're talking about cow's milk, not goat's milk or condensed milk or skim milk. Here at Dandy Don's HomeMade Ice Cream, we haven't gotten into goat's milk flavors yet. But we do have a flavor made with mascarpone cheese.  

A gallon of ice cream must weigh at least 4.5 pounds.  

Let's break down those ingredients and then we'll tell you how ice cream is made.

Butterfat: Fat is flavor, my friends. We may hate it on the waistline but we love it on the tongue. The more butterfat you start with, the creamier your ice cream will taste and feel. At Dandy Don's we normally use 14-16% butterfat in our ice cream. The best and most widely used source of fat for ice cream is fresh sweet cream. We get ours from Driftwood Dairy in El Monte.

Milk Solids: Made up of the proteins casein and whey and the milk sugar lactose. Too few solids and your ice cream will be one giant frozen block of ice; too many solids and your ice cream will taste cooked or gritty or salty.

Sweeteners: Most ice cream mixes contain both cane (or beet) sugar and corn syrup. Corn syrup helps to give your ice cream extra body and texture.

Stabilizers: Stabilizers help the ice cream handle temperature fluctuations without becoming ruined. They also add body and bite resistance. When you make ice cream at home without any added stabilizers, you might notice how quickly it melts compared to commercial brands. Too many stabilizers, however, can make your ice cream overly chewy. Some common stabilizing ingredients include CMC, locust bean and guar gums, sodium and propylene glycol alginates, carrageenan (Irish moss extract), and gelatin.

Emulsifiers: Emulsifiers are used to stiffen ice cream and to help it hold air. In order to make a square ice cream bar, emulsifiers must be added to ice cream to help it keep an extruded shape. They also help manufacturers of cheaper brands pump more air into their product, reducing their cost.  

Air: Sure, we need it to breathe. But nobody wants too much of it in their ice cream. Air is pumped into ice cream during the churning process. Air can be churned in naturally (as in home machines and batch freezers like we use here at Dandy Don's), or artificially (as in larger continuous freezers used by national ice cream companies). The less air added during freezing, the better. Overrun is the term we use in the industry to describe how much air is in the ice cream. Technically it means the volume of ice cream obtained over and above the volume of mix used. High quality ice cream doesn't exceed 100% overrun. At Dandy Don's our overrun is very low.   We put 6 or 7 gallons of ingredients into our machine and get 9 gallons out. That makes our overrun between 30% and 50%.