This ice cream will expand and fluff up during churning. It is ready when it looks smooth and fluffy, with the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. The total churning time depends on your ice cream maker and could be anywhere from 30-70 minutes.
To evaluate if it is ready, lift a spoonful; it should be thick enough to stand on the spoon, but it will still be soft like soft-serve ice cream. If it looks watery or starts to melt the moment you spoon it, leave it to churn for longer.
In any case, if you feel doubts about the consistency, leave it to churn for ten minutes more. But beware: at this stage, do not expect it to be like store-bought carton ice cream; for now, it should be more like soft-serve ice cream.
It will firm up and become like store-bought ice cream only after it sets in the freezer.
So, stop the ice cream maker when thick and creamy, as described above. If you leave to churn it for much longer, it will start turning grainy.
Warning: some ice cream makers are programmed to stop after a specific time, which doesn’t make sense because the ice cream may need to churn for more to reach its fullest potential. So, if you notice that your ice cream maker stops on its own and upon checking the ice cream, you find that it is sloppy instead of fluffy, try to turn the machine on again and leave it to churn until it reaches the desired texture.
24 Responses
First of all, great website, great recipe, great tips along the way and very easy to follow. Incredible better than the books I bought on the subject. Just waiting for blueberry, raspberry, peach (custard) recipes and maybe a crack at watermelon/cantaloupe/melon proper custard recipes 🙂
Tried this recipe with slightly less dosage so it fits my 1L ice cream machine but after chilling it overnight I noticed 2 things: first it gets a very “thick”, but it’s my first time using xanthan so maybe it’s normal 🙂 , I only used 3g 2nd, on my ice cream maker (freezer container, not cuisinart but ‘Lidl’ brand) it stalls the paddle only after 1 or 2 minutes. I get that sometimes but only much later at the process in thicker creams.
The mixture was at 5ºC, I don’t know if it was because of this that it ‘froze’ too quickly on the machine or if it was too much gum causing it to be very thick. Previously I only chill it about 1h on the fridge and sometimes just a quick ice bath.
Any tips besides just buying a cuisinart maker? (on the way)
Hi Andre! First of all, thank you for your nice words :).
Regarding the ice cream recipe, the ice cream mixture does not become very thick after chilling, so this is the reason you ice cream maker didn’t manage to churn it. In my experience, the thickness of this xanthan gum ice cream is such that most ice cream makers should be able to work with, it doesn’t need to be a Cuisinart to properly churn it. Maybe the heavy cream you used was too thick? May I ask the fat% of the heavy cream you used?
It’s 35% since that’s the max available in my country. I need to try again with less chilling time on the fridge and a tad lower gum dose. Those were the only 2 differences I did from previous ice creams.
UPDATE July 16, 2023: If the ice cream mixture is thick after chilling, give it a blitz with the immersion blender; this will loosen it so that it will churn for longer and create a fluffier texture. (Old reply Aug 11, 2021: Your ice cream ingredients and the procedure you use seem to be perfect. For some odd reason, it seems as though the xanthan gum dose was too much for you, but I cannot figure out why. If you like, I would love to know how your next attempt goes. Also, if you could tell me which brand of xanthan gum you have used so that I can try and find it to see if it works differently than mine, it would be useful. I really want the recipes on this site to work for anyone, so I put a lot of effort on finding why something that works for me doesn’t work for you. Thank you again for your feedback!)
This ice cream is beyond awesome. I found your website, by chance, and am so thrilled with this recipe. I made the ice cream tonight with a couple of detours, I used monk fruit instead of processed sugar. After removing custard from the heat I added the vanilla and 1/2 tsp of Bob’s Red Mill Xanthan Gum plus 17 oz of fresh strawberries I pureed in my Vitamix with an additional tablespoon of monk fruit.
I cooled the custard in the sink with cool water.
My ice cream freezer is packed so I chilled a 9 X 9 stainless steel baking pan and poured in the strawberry custard and put in the freezer.
I just checked and it is not quite frozen, but enough to sample. It is a heavenly thick creamy ice cream without ice crystals.
I am so intrigued with your recipe. Thank you thank you. It is the best.
Thank you, Elizabeth! So glad it inspired you to make an ice cream you loved!
I followed your instructions to the tee! But Im putting in my creami ice cream machine.😁 THANK YOU very easy to follow
Hope you like it! Thank you for your comment!
How refreshing to find a site that is not thick with advertising and popups. But also that publishes such carefully crafted, user-friendly, and elegantly-designed guidance on recipes
Thank you for you feed-back, it means the world to us!
One more thing: none of your recipes involve eggs – any comment?
Almost all of our ice cream flavours come in 4 versions:
– with egg yolks link to section
– Philadelphia – style (no eggs, relies on lots of heavy cream) link to section
– with corn starch (no eggs, thickened with corn starch) link to section
– with xanthan gum (no eggs, thickened with xanthan gum) link to section
In each section scroll down and you will find all the flavours available. Hope this helps 🙂
If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear them!
Xanthum gum, like Eggs are a binder. Xanthum gum replaces the egg. You don’t need both .
Egg yolks provide flavour, although not in this strawberry ice cream, both xanthan gum and egg yolks may be used in other cases.
Olá boa noite gostaria de saber se posso fazer um sorbet com a goma xantana como espessante e qual seria a proporção dela para a de água e a de açúcar, muito obrigado!
Do you mean strawberry sorbet? Because it depends on the fruit. But the short answer is yes, you can use xanthan gum to make a sorbet, but it depends on the water content. If it contains too much water, like a lemon sorbet, it may have to be combined with another thickener for best results.
Lisa,
You are an absolute gem! I tried (for the first time) your recipe using xanthan gum and it came out perfectly. I use a Kenwood ice cream maker. So now all the kids, in my rather remote neighbourhood, get ice cream every Friday afternoon; for many it is the first time they have ever eaten ice cream.
Many thanks for your guidance.
So glad to hear that! It is such a warm feeling to know that some children got to know about ice cream from this recipe. 🙂 Thank you for sharing!
Thank you SO much for the xanthan gum recipes! I would love to make this with cherries, and w/o blending the cherries into a puree but rather leave them in halves (like burgundy cherry ice cream). Can this be done at the end?
Fresh fruit contains water, so if left whole, they will be like little pieces of ice in the ice cream. Furthermore, if you remove the strawberry puree, the remaining ice cream mixture will be out of balance and will not churn properly. You may want to start with a recipe like this: https://asktheicecreamqueen.com/recipes/ice-cream-with-xanthan-gum/.
If you want to add cherries, you can use preserves, which contain enough sugar to stay soft and palatable. To add cherry preserves, strain them thoroughly to remove excess syrup and add them to the ice cream during the last minutes of churning, as I do in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXuy4vDgCY. At 02:27 in the video, I start adding the cookie crumbs. I hope this helps! :)”
Can’t wait to try this recipe. Can frozen strawberries be used? Thawed and then macerated?
If I were to use frozen and thawed recipes, I would use this method instead: https://youtu.be/fs4ObjnPzDE. It is the same recipe, just a different method which I find is more suitable for frozen strawberries.
Best and easiest ice-cream site using xanthan gum that I have come across. Thank you. Strawberry ice-cream perfect.
Thank you for your comment. 🙂