Recipe Test: Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream Base (Vanilla)

Trying out the recipe for America's fanciest (i.e. most expensive) mass market ice cream!

$10.50 for a pint bro-ski. And that’s on sale!

An admission: when Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream first showed up on the scene, I wanted to dislike it. Everything about it—the obscenely high price point, the nauseatingly bespoke and artisanal nature of the ingredients and branding, the All-American girl vibes—rubbed me the wrong way. Only the high price point still sticks in my craw today,¹ but when Jeni’s first went on sale, I was a low-key hater.

Some OG Jeni’s pints. The sharpie lettering is doing some major bespok-i-ness work.

What quickly won me over was the ice cream itself. I tried it and found that it was good! And not just good-good…but very, very good! I haven’t eaten a ton of Jeni’s (again, the the high price point), but I have received their Delivery Box a few times as a gift, and have purchased the occasional pint from Whole Foods over the years. The ice cream has always been outstanding.

On the strength of these experiences, I decided to try making her base recipe. Once again, I was deeply impressed. I can’t recall for certain, but I’m pretty sure I tried this one first, and I know I’ve also made this one a few times over the years. Both came out delicious.²

Yet quality is not the primary reason I think Jeni’s recipe is the ideal candidate for the second full post on this blog. The biggest reason is that her recipe is so singular and distinct from traditional custard and Philadelphia-style ice cream recipes. She doesn’t use eggs to thicken the batter or higher percentages of cream and sugar. Instead, she uses cream cheese, tapioca (or corn) syrup, and tapioca (or corn) starch. This may sound strange—especially the cream cheese part—but trust me: it works. So let’s get into it!

I used this recipe and then added a vanilla bean and a 1/4 tsp of vanilla extract.

Ingredients, assemble!

You start by taking a 1/4 cup of the milk and combining it with the cornstarch to make a slurry.

The cornstarch milk slurry (something about the word “slurry” just tickles my fancy).

Note: Jeni uses tapioca starch when making her ice cream (remember, it’s artisinal folks!³). Yet she also makes abundantly clear that cornstarch will work just fine. We had tapioca on hand, and I meant to use it, but for some reason, I can never quite execute recipes correctly. Something always gets jacked up (that fancy bottle of Morton and Bassett vanilla extract pictured above? Well my clumsy a** knocked it over at one point during the batter prep, spilling about a 1/6th of the bottle).

In terms of process, it’s pretty simple: you combine the milk, cream, sugar, salt, and corn syrup in a pot and heat it to a boil. Like so:

As you can see, our Wedgewood stovetop is looking pretty grimy these days…

After boiling the mixture, you add in the starch slurry and cook until it thickens.

Once this is done, you have to incorporate the cream cheese. Nota bene! It is super important to let the cream cheese soften to room temperature. If you don’t, it is very difficult to incorporate it into the batter. I left the cream cheese out for about 3 hours.

Softened cream cheese on a bagel: BAD! Softened cream cheese in Jeni’s ice cream: GOOD!

Once the batter is nice and hot and thickened, you pour some into the cream cheese and then whisk it until smooth. In my experience, you have to whisk the dickens out of it to get a good smooth texture. And even then, it might not get completely smooth (more on that in a moment).

Here’s what the cream cheese and batter looked like after 2 minutes of whisking.

Once I incorporated the cream cheese slurry into the rest of the batter I added a vanilla bean (split and scraped) and a 1/4 tsp of vanilla extract. Then I dumped it in a metal mixing bowl and cooled it in an ice bath in the sink (I half-remembered the ice bath this time! Did it on the fly).

However, in the process of chilling the batter, I noticed some small flecks of cream cheese that had not fully smoothed out / incorporated into the batter. But no need to panic! I just busted out the immersion blender and blended it for about thirty seconds before straining it into a container and storing it in the fridge overnight to cool and marinate.

The batter is now ready to be chilled overnight.

What my experience with the cream cheese and immersion blender illustrates (I think), is that this recipe is far more forgiving than custard recipes like the one developed by Melissa Clark. If you mess up the custard, you can’t blend your way out of that error. You have to start over. With this recipe, the blender trick worked just fine. I know it may seem like I’m making too much hay over the finickiness of custard recipes, but Jeni’s recipe is both easier to make and easier to repair than custard. Granted, there are some potential snags using Jeni’s method, like if you don’t soften the cream cheese. But once you iron those out, the process is almost foolproof.

Okay, okay, here’s the batter churning away.

As you can see, the color is much whiter than custard (i.e., no egg yolks).

Sharpie game needs work.

And the results?

First taste out of the machine!

Based on my first taste right out of the machine, I thought Jeni had Melissa beat by a mile. The flavor and texture was insanely delicious. This assessment generally held up after the overnight freeze, but…

Our first true sample of Jeni’s. It scooped out beautifully.

…After sampling it more fully, the overall verdict amongst my kids, my wife, and even me, is that the Melissa Clark vanilla custard was slightly better. It’s hard to say this definitively since we ate the two ice creams a week apart. As my wife rightly pointed out, it’s absurd to ask for a comparison under such conditions. 😂

Be that as it may, Melissa’s recipe had a stronger and tastier vanilla flavor than Jeni’s (this may be because I didn’t let the vanilla bean steep long enough as compared to the custard last week. It’s hard to say for sure though. I’m not exactly operating under test kitchen conditions here) and a slightly creamier texture (maybe the immersion blender messed with something).

But we’re splitting hairs here. The ice cream came out excellent and everyone enjoyed it. It was rich, very creamy, and had a wonderfully fresh vanilla taste. The fam ended up making root beer floats, which inspired me to have a mini orange float for seconds.

Maybe better than an Orange Creamsicle?

I started this post by acknowledging my bias against Jeni’s, a bias that has slowly dwindled over time.⁴ So I’ll close with this: Let this be the day where any lingering disdain for Jeni and her exquisite ice cream is buried for good! Because the simple truth is that Jeni’s makes outstanding ice cream. You should consider making or buying some (if you can afford it) for your family and friends.

Next week, we’re doing vanilla ice cream Philadelphia style. Have no fear, folks. We’ll move on from vanilla soon enough. Just trust the process. Trust the process.

1. Even if I understand why the price is so high (ingredients, no stabilizers), $10.50 for a pint of store-bought ice cream is really high. Especially when I can get a really good pint of Ben & Jerry’s for about $5. I know, I know, B&J is owned by big bad Unilever, they can exploit economies of scale, yada yada yada. At the end of the day though, $10.50 just feels too high.

The nauseatingly bespoke and artisanal ingredients, however, don’t really bug me anymore. Like most people, I often enjoy consuming products that are made with artisanal and bespoke ingredients. I might make fun of the inanity of a business model that calls waaaay too much attention to its finely sourced ingredients, but that doesn’t mean I’m above consuming their tasty treats.

As for hating on the All-American girl vibes, I’ll just say this: what could be more All-American than ice cream? It now seems silly for me to critique an ice cream brand for being All-American when that’s exactly what ice cream is in so much of this country. Relatedly—though somewhat differently I will admit—my lefty anti-Americanism has mellowed out quite a bit over the past few years (for reasons I won’t belabor here), so Americana vibes don’t irk me as much as they used to.

2. If you’re wondering, those recipes match what’s in her first cookbook. I don’t own said cookbook, but I confirmed by skimming through a copy at Barnes & Noble.

3. I know I’m reading too much into this, but the choice to use tapioca feels kind of political. It’s like cornstarch is like the evil Monsanto Republican candidate, while tapioca is the vegetarian, socialist, peacenik candidate.

4. Let’s be real: part of what was driving my antipathy towards Jeni’s was jealousy, plain and simple. I mean, I’ve never seriously contemplated starting my own ice cream business. But the idea of doing so is theoretically appealing, and has crossed my mind in the most abstract kind of way. I guess sometimes it’s easy to hate on someone who’s doing the thing you can’t do yourself (and doing it really well no less).