How Much Booze Is Too Much In Homemade Ice Cream?

Boozy ice cream has been around quite a while – Haagen-Dazs ice cream has featured rum raisin since the '80s, while the same flavor became popular in the Caribbean in the '30s. In 2019, Haagen-Dazs once again took the vanguard in booze infusions by creating a "Spirits" line flavored with bourbon, Irish cream, Amaretto, and stout in addition to rum. Still, premium ice cream doesn't come cheap, so in order to save money and choose your own flavors, you might be considering making your own boozy concoctions. Before you get started, the all-important question is, how much alcohol can you add before it's too much? For an answer, Mashed consulted with Melissa Tavss, founder and CEO of alcoholic frozen dessert company Tipsy Scoop.

Tavss says the company's cookbook ("Tipsy Scoop™ Latest and Greatest Recipes") has ice cream and sorbet recipes containing up to 5% alcohol by volume. As she explains, this is the "sweet spot" that will allow you to create what she describes as "ice creams that have that true ice cream consistency we know and love, but also contain alcohol that you can actually taste in the end product." As to how you can achieve this in a sorbet, you can use a cup of alcohol per 3 cups of fruit and anywhere from half a cup to two cups of simple syrup. For ice cream, however, you may need to reduce the amount to just half a cup of booze for every 3 cups of ice cream.

One interesting fact Melissa Tavss points out is that adding alcohol to homemade ice cream can actually help to soften it and prevent the dreaded ice crystals from forming on the outside. She does add one caveat, though, telling us: "You have to ensure your ice cream base recipe has at least 14% butterfat content to be able to hold the alcohol without jeopardizing the consistency." If you'll be boozing up a store-bought base instead of starting from scratch, Blue Bunny ice cream has about 15% butterfat, while Haagen-Dazs comes in at around 16%.

Of course, dairy-based ice creams aren't the only frozen concoctions that can benefit from the addition of alcohol. Even sorbet recipes that aren't specifically booze-flavored may call for a small amount of the stuff since it keeps the liquid from freezing into a solid block of ice and allows the fruit and sugar mixture to remain soft. Too much alcohol, however, and the sorbet might not freeze at all and you'll wind up with boozy slush, instead. (Not that a boozy slushy like the limoncello-based sgroppino is a bad thing, but you'll need to dish it up in a glass instead of a bowl.) It's a delicate balance, making sure you have the proper proportions of all ingredients in order to achieve the optimal texture for alcoholic sorbet or ice cream. Unless you're a food chemist, it's best to start with a recipe that's already been tested.