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Most no-churn ice cream recipes rely on shelf-stable dairy like evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk. While these shortcuts create a sweet and creamy dessert, they often miss the mark on texture. What you gain in convenience, you lose in the luscious, custardy quality that defines classic French-style ice cream.
Pastry chef Stella Parks offers a smarter approach. Instead of skipping eggs entirely, she cooks a mixture of eggs and sugar over a gentle double boiler until it reaches 160°F (71°C). This creates a safe, velvety base. The mixture is then whipped until pale, thick, and fluffy, before being folded with softly whipped cream. The result? A no-churn ice cream that is rich, airy, and scoopable—with the creamy body and structure of traditional churned ice cream, but no machine required.
In short: with the right technique, homemade no-churn ice cream doesn’t just freeze—it scoops, swirls, and melts in your mouth like the real deal.
Why No-Churn Ice Cream Needed an Upgrade 🍨🚫🌀
Humans have been finding ways to enjoy frozen sweets for thousands of years, dating back to the first person who drizzled something sweet over snow. Today, most cooks rely on ice cream machines to churn and freeze the classic dessert. But for many, a machine isn’t always practical: they’re expensive, bulky, and often require an overnight pre-freeze of the bowl (which, let’s be honest, is easy to forget).
That’s why no-churn recipes are so appealing. Most of them rely on a combination of whipped cream and canned dairy—usually sweetened condensed milk or evaporated milk. These formulas are simple and do produce a creamy result, but they come with two major downsides:
- They introduce a distinct canned flavor that doesn’t quite taste like true ice cream.
- They lack the rich, custardy depth of traditional French-style ice cream, which owes its luxurious body to egg yolks.
Enter pastry chef Stella Parks, who set out to fix this problem. Her solution unlocked a new world of no-churn frozen treats, ranging from classic custard-style ice creams to airy, sliceable fillings for DIY Klondike bars and frozen pies. The key? Eggs—but not just as an add-in.
At first glance, the idea may sound obvious: custard gets its richness from eggs, so adding them to a no-churn recipe should help. But Stella didn’t just throw eggs into the mix. She developed an entirely new technique, carefully balancing how the eggs are heated, whipped, and aerated before freezing. That technique produces a base that’s fluffy, custardy, and smooth—one that freezes into ice cream that’s light, creamy, and scoopable, all without a churn.
The Game-Changing Method: Heat, Whip, Fold, Freeze 🍦🔑
Stella Parks’ breakthrough comes down to a precise yet surprisingly simple technique. She begins by gently heating eggs and sugar over a hot water bath until the mixture reaches 160°F (71°C). At this temperature, the base is safe from Salmonella and primed to hold maximum air once whipped.
From there, the egg mixture is transferred to a stand mixer, where it’s whipped until pale, thick, and fluffy—soft and voluminous, almost like swirls of soft-serve. To transform this airy foundation into something that tastes unmistakably like ice cream, Stella folds in whipped cream, adding richness and body. After freezing, the mixture firms up into ice cream that’s creamy, scoopable, and impressively close in texture to churned custard.
But that’s just the beginning. This base technique became the springboard for a whole new category of no-churn frozen desserts. For pies, ice cream bars, and frozen fillings where the goal isn’t custardy richness but the pure, fresh taste of dairy, Stella swaps the egg yolks for a different approach: Swiss meringue. By whipping heated egg whites with sugar, she creates a stable, airy structure that mimics the lightness of American- or Philadelphia-style ice cream—egg-free in flavor, even if not technically egg-free in ingredients.
It’s a clever twist: by manipulating technique instead of just ingredients, she delivers both custardy French-style and light American-style ice creams—no machine necessary.
Why Swiss Meringue Is the Secret to Frozen Bars and Pies 🍓🍫🥧
For Stella Parks, the Swiss meringue method isn’t just a clever workaround for people without an ice cream machine—it’s her preferred technique when making frozen fillings for desserts like homemade Klondike bars, strawberry shortcake ice cream bars, and sliceable ice cream pies.
By folding Swiss meringue (heated, whipped egg whites stabilized with sugar) into softly whipped cream, she strikes the perfect balance: a base that’s light, fluffy, and airy, yet firm enough to hold its shape when sliced or bitten into.
This approach hits a sweet spot between styles:
- Not as heavy or dense as fior di latte gelato.
- Not as thin or icy as old-fashioned ice milk.
- Not as custardy as classic no-churn vanilla.
Instead, the result is ice cream with the ideal texture for frozen novelties—creamy but not overwhelming, airy but substantial, and perfectly scoopable or sliceable. It proves that no-churn ice cream isn’t just a compromise, but a technique with its own unique strengths.
How to Make Swiss Meringue for No-Churn Ice Cream 🍨🧁
At its core, Swiss meringue is wonderfully simple. Made with nothing more than egg whites, sugar, salt, cream of tartar, and a splash of vanilla, it starts with combining the ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer. The bowl is then set over gently steaming water, where the mixture is stirred and scraped until the egg whites reach a stable, silky consistency.
From there, the magic happens: the mixture is whipped at high speed in a stand mixer until it becomes glossy, fluffy, and able to hold stiff peaks. At this stage, it’s stable, airy, and ready to be transformed into the base for no-churn frozen desserts.
To take it into “ice cream territory,” Stella Parks adds a few key steps:
- Whip heavy cream until it forms stiff peaks.
- Add a splash of milk to the Swiss meringue, ensuring the mixture firms up properly when frozen.
- Whisk in the whipped cream until smooth and homogenous.
The result is a mixture that freezes into a texture perfectly suited for ice cream pies and bars—creamy yet firm, sliceable yet airy. While Stella notes that this method can be too dense for traditional scoops in a bowl, it’s unmatched for frozen treats that need structure without heaviness.
In other words, it’s a trick that unlocks a whole new category of summer desserts—all without the need for an ice cream machine.
