Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

This is based on a recipe that came with our Cuisinart ice cream maker, but I made a few changes. One was to use raw milk (though any kind of milk or cream or milk substitute will work fine). Another was to green things up.

Ingredients

• 1 cup raw milk
• 2 cups fresh mint leaves, packed
• 2 drops green food coloring
• 3/4 cup sugar
• pinch salt
• 2 cups cream/milk combined
• 2 t vanilla
• 3/4 cup mini chocolate chips

Assembly

1. Heat the cup of milk until just starting to foam at the edges. Turn off heat and press in mint leaves. (Object--to submerge as many leaves as you can in the milk.)
2. Wait 30 minutes. Strain out mint leaves, squeezing them well to get as much milk out as you can.
3. Add 2 drops of food coloring. If you want a less modest green, add as many drops as you like. Also, stir in the sugar and salt and keep stirring until dissolved.
4. Add the 2 cups cream/milk (see note below) and the vanilla. Chill for 2 hours or more.
5. When ready, process the mixture in your ice cream maker following the manufacturer's instructions. In the last 5 minutes of mixing, add the mini chocolate chips.
   

Notes

To get 2 packed cups of mint leaves I used a whole shopping bag of mint on-the-stem that had been collected by a kind mint donor (thanks mom!). I stripped off the leaves and rinsed them, but wasn't too fussy about what they looked like... or how clean they were.

By "cream/milk" I mean you can add 2 cups of cream, or 1 cup of cream and 1 cup of milk, or some other combo, including 2 cups of 100% milk. The raw milk that I used had a raft of heavy yellow cream floating on top, so we tried to use as much of that as we could. We probably got about a cup, then made up the difference with milk. (Does that make sense? Hope so.)

My ice cream maker seems to take 20 minutes before the ice cream stops moving and the frozen container just spins uselessly. The trick is to add the chips before the spinning stops so they get mixed in. I wasn't entirely successful with this and had to do some stirring with a spoon. No big deal. Here's what it looked like after I'd served a bowl and packed it up for freezing and eating later.


How did it taste? DELICIOUS. The real mint flavor was amazing. Bold, but not too overpowering. I have never purchased mini chocolate chips before this--they were perfect. This recipe is a keeper.