Boxed Ice Cream

One thing I’ve discovered in grocery stores in Tunisia (where I’m staying right now) is that they truly love desserts that come out of boxes. There are full isles in the grocery stores dedicated to baking and dessert making that comes out of a box. While most of these desserts and baked goods are fairly similar to what you find in many countries, there is one thing that really stood out to me, boxed do it yourself ice cream.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen ice cream in a box before, and there’s no way I was gong to let it pass me by.

Have you ever had a boxed dessert that seemed to easy to be true? This can really happen for two reasons, either there is truly very few steps to follow in order to make your dessert, or it’s such a complicated dessert (often requiring specific machinery) that you can’t believe that it can be made out of a box. This chocolate ice cream is the rare occasion where it’s both of those. This ice cream requires no ice cream machine at all, and the only other ingredient needed is milk.

It’s also not that complicated to make, just mix in the powder with the milk for a few minutes. Honestly it’s so simple that it had me worried about what was going to come out.

After my few minutes of mixing I was ready to let my freezer do the rest of the work. The liquid in my container looked and felt a lot like some of the ice cream starters I’ve seen in the past, so that was positive. The thing that made me nervous was the fact that it wasn’t going to be stirred while, before or after freezing. The instructions did suggest letting your ice cream sit for a few minutes before serving, so maybe that’ll help?

The end product kind of resembled ice cream. It did have ice crystals throughout and also seemed to be darker on the bottom and lighter on the top. Other than that the everything seemed okay... ish. Honestly those two problems do make for unimpressive ice cream. The end result was a little softer than I expected, and tasted pretty good too. The ice crystals were the most annoying thing about this ice cream, but it wasn’t the worst. The two different layers tasted the same as far as I can tell, but the texture of the darker parts was a little gooier than the light stuff.

All in all it wasn’t the best ice cream I’ve ever had, but it was remarkable considering how little work I had to do to make it. I’m not sure I would suggest this as an all the time ice cream substitute, but as a science experiment it was kind of fun.