How to Make Ice-cream without a Machine

Hot summer days are finally here and cravings for ice-cream and all things cold are at an all time high. As kids, summers meant a whole lot of ice-creams and Popsicles ...not store-bought but made right at home. Mom conducted ice-cream making classes and after each class my brother and I got to gorge on atleast 3 flavours at a time. She has never used an ice-cream maker/machine anytime and the fact that she didn't made those ice-creams even more precious and special.


Last year I made ice-cream at home for the first time without the use of a machine. Its simple but requires time and effort, which are definitely worth it. Our all time favourite flavour is Mango, and there is something about Indian Mango ice-cream which sets it apart from Mango ice-cream I've eaten anywhere else. It simply tastes so much more mango-ey! The following is mom's recipe for Mango ice-cream. I made this ice-cream again this year.

Home-made Mango ice-cream:


You will need:

3 cups Whole milk

3 tbsp Sugar

2 tbsp Vanilla custard powder (Brand: Brown & Polson)

2 cups Sweetened condensed milk

1 Cup Mango Puree

2 Cups Heavy whipping cream

½ tsp Clear vanilla extract

¼ tsp Orange Red colour (powder preferably)

Hand-held electric beater, the one which can withstand heavy whipping.

Make a smooth paste of the custard powder and ¼ cup of milk. Bring remaining milk to a boil in a heavy saucepan. Add sugar and stir to dissolve. When the milk comes to a rolling boil, reduce heat and slowly stir in the custard mixture. Keep stirring till the milk thickens. The custard is ready when it coats the back of a spoon. Remove from heat and let cool completely.

While the custard is cooling, take a large bowl (which will fit into your freezer) and blend the mango puree with the condensed milk. Stir well to combine. Once the custard has cooled, add it to the puree-condensed milk mixture. Also add the heavy cream, the vanilla extract and food colour.

Cover and freeze for an hour.

What follows next is the important step…the 'churning' or whipping part. Since this ice-cream is made without an ice-cream maker, doing it right manually determines the final quality of the resulting ice-cream.

Remove bowl from freezer and using a hand beater, whip the mixture for 10 minutes at the highest speed on your beater. The mixture will begin to bubble because of the whipped cream. Return to freezer for another 30 minutes.

Repeat the whipping process, but reduce time to 5 minutes. Return to freezer for 30 minutes.

This needs to be done 2 more times(once every 30 mins). By the third time your mixture would have thickened and would be harder to ‘churn’. Let your hand-mixer do its thing.

After the last churn, you can transfer ice-cream to containers and then freeze or return the same bowl to the freezer. Freeze overnight or for atleast 6 hours.

This ice-cream brought back very sweet memories. And at the rate we are eating the ice-cream I might have to make another batch very soon!