Goat ice cream?

Given our total dependency on ice cream, we had at first assumed we'd be making our own with our goat cream. While we were still living in Wellesley, we had gotten 2 gallon buckets of something called Honey Goat Ice Cream from our coop, and had fallen in love with it. So why not make some from our own goat milk?

We even found an antique cream separator so we could collect the cream to be the featured ingredient.

(Goat milk does not separate spontaneously and create a cream line as cow milk does. Goat milk is naturally homogenized.)

To separate the milk from the cream, you just pour it in the top of the separator and crank the handle a lot, and out of one faucet comes cream while out of the second comes the skimmed milk.

So on our first try, we got the apparatus set up right, and poured in the whole milk. Out came the skimmed milk, but just heavy plops of cream came out of the other faucet.

Eventually we had to take the separator apart, and what we found was cream stuck to everything, but cream the consistency of putty or semi-hard butter.

There was nothing really wrong with it. All it was was supremely heavy cream, so heavy that it couldn't flow out of the machine.

So we scraped it off as much as we could (licked the rest off - it was delicious!), collected it, and prepared to make ice cream.

Usually ice cream is made with liquid cream, but we figured this had to work in a similar fashion. So we put all the ingredients (cream, sugar, fruit) in the ice cream maker, added the ice and salt to the outside chamber, and started cranking.

In maybe 45 seconds we heard a strange slapping or thumping sound, and the crank no longer turned easily. Soooo, we disassembled the whole ice cream maker, and there stuck to the paddles was...

Butter!

You'd never know it by looking at whole goat milk, but the cream is so heavy that you can almost never make it into ice cream, because it turns to butter first.

This butter we had just made was sweet and fruity, and actually quite wonderful spread on bagels. But it was not ice cream!

We gave up making ice cream at that point. We had a hideous amount of clean-up to do with all the parts of the cream separator and all the parts of the ice cream maker, and it just wasn't worth it.

Later we did make ice milk, and we used eggs to make a custard based rich ice milk as another way of using our own produce. But mostly we just bought ice cream at the store.