Vanilla ice cream

• 4 tbsp infused butter

  Set your infusion strength above and this splits into infused and plain butter to hit whatever dose you want.

• 2 cupsheavy cream
• 1 cupwhole milk
• ¾ cupgranulated sugar
• 6egg yolks
• 1vanilla bean — split and scraped, or 1 tbsp vanilla paste
• ¼ tspfine salt

Method

1. 01

   Warm the cream, milk, half the sugar, the vanilla bean and pod and the salt until steam rises and small bubbles gather at the edge. Take it off the heat and leave it to steep for twenty minutes.

   20 min

2. 02

   Whisk the yolks with the remaining sugar until pale and thick enough to fall in a ribbon.

3. 03

   Ladle a cup of the warm dairy into the yolks while whisking, then pour that back into the pan. Adding it gradually is what keeps the yolks from setting into threads of sweet scrambled egg.

4. 04

   Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly with a spatula and scraping the bottom, until the custard reaches 175 °F and coats the back of the spatula. Do not let it boil.

   175 °F · 8 min

5. 05

   Off the heat, with the custard still hot, pour in the melted infused butter and blend with an immersion blender for a full thirty seconds. This is the step the whole recipe turns on: the fat has to be broken into droplets while the custard is warm and the yolk lecithin can hold them there.

   1 min

6. 06

   Stirring the same butter into a cold base would not work. It would stay as separate fat, float, and freeze into hard flecks — which taste wrong and, more to the point, put the dose in whichever scoop happens to catch them.

7. 07

   Strain through a fine sieve into a bowl, press plastic wrap onto the surface and chill for at least eight hours. A cold base churns faster and freezes with smaller ice crystals.

   480 min

8. 08

   Blend the cold base for ten seconds before it goes into the machine, so anything that has settled is back in suspension before it freezes in place.

9. 09

   Churn in an ice cream maker until it holds the texture of soft-serve, then pack into a container and freeze until firm.

   25 min

10. 10

    Serve with a leveled disher rather than a spoon, counting twelve scoops from the batch. A heaped scoop against a leveled one is close to half a serving of difference. Keep the container labeled in the back of the freezer.