My Homemade Soft Serve Is Better Than Anything From An Ice Cream Truck (2024)

Soft serve ice cream is one of summer’s greatest pleasures. But when you’re too impatient to wait for the ice cream truck, there’s just one solution: make your own.

The Soft Serve Challenge

Soft serve is one of those magical processed food creations, so you might assume you need a fancy machine, special ingredients, or at the very least, an ice cream maker to create your own. In fact, many recipes for homemade soft serve do require an ice cream machine. But my boss, food director Rob Seixas, had other ideas. “No fancy equipment,” he said. “Make it so anyone can do it.”

That was true for ingredients too. Xanthan gum, guar gum, soy lecithin, and all the emulsifiers and stabilizers found in typical soft serve ice cream were out of the question. I needed to make this recipe with ingredients any home cook would have.

Testing Testing, 1-2-3

After a lot of research, I determined there were two basic ways that people seemed to make soft serve ice cream without an ice cream machine:

A: The Whipped Cream Method: Heat heavy cream and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in vanilla and salt. Chill until cold, then whip with a hand blender until stiff peaks form. Freeze until firm (but still pipeable), then add to a piping bag and pipe away.

B: The No-Churn Method: Whip heavy cream until stiff peaks form. Fold in sweetened condensed milk, vanilla, and salt, then chill until firm.

I tested the two methods side by side on the same day. Method B yielded a super creamy no-churn ice cream, but it wasn’t soft serve. It was too stiff to pipe. It was heavy and rich, and it left a coating of richness inside my mouth, instead of melting away into nothing quickly like a classic soft serve does.

Method A had no body at all. It piped like a dream and held its shape for a ridiculous amount of time at room temperature. But it tasted just like frozen cool whip—not surprising, given that it was basically just frozen whipped cream. No luck there, either.

I was standing in the test kitchen tasting the recipes when the lightbulb went off: I needed to combine both methods somehow so I could get the lightness of A with a little bit of the body of B. I needed to create a franken-recipe.

C: The Franken-Method: Heat cream and a little sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in vanilla and salt. Chill until cold, then whip with a hand blender until stiff peaks form. Fold in a little sweetened condensed milk, then freeze until firm. Add to a piping bag and pipe away.

My Soft Serve Solution

My first attempt at Method C wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to tell me it was destined for greatness. Adding a small amount of sweetened condensed milk to the cold sweetened whipped cream brought enough body and richness for it to leave the realm of frozen cool whip and into the world of soft serve, but not so much that it became hard-set ice cream. A few more small tweaks and I had perfected the winning recipe.

The next time you’re craving a sky-high cone, head back into the kitchen instead of out to the drive-thru. You’re just five ingredients and a hand-mixer away from soft serve greatness.