Honey Ice Cream
This simple honey ice cream recipe makes a creamy bowl of goodness that tastes as rich as it looks. Five ingredients; plump vanilla beans, heavy cream, whole milk, honey, and a bit of salt. That's it.
This is an ice cream recipe I’ve turned to for over twenty years. Part of the draw is the simplicity. The other part is the flavor. It’s just five ingredients churned into billowy, vanilla flecked ice cream with no refined sugar. The only sweetener is honey, use your favorite, it comes through wonderfully direct.
Honey Ice Cream: the Inspiration
I’ve long enjoyed cooking from Patricia Wells' cookbooks. Her recipes strike a perfect balance of reliability, simplicity of ingredients, and deliciousness. I started making this honey ice cream when I spotted it in The Paris Cookbook twenty-plus years ago. I liked to make it for friends served with these ginger cookies, and it never rotated out of my repertoire.
The method: The recipe couldn't be simpler. Heat all your ingredients in a saucepan and let them steep for an hour. Chill the mixture, pour it into your ice cream maker and let it run until your ice cream is the consistency of the above picture. I used to use a little, freeze-ahead Krups ice cream maker (it worked well for years!) and eventually upgraded to a Breville Smart Scoop.
You *can* make this ice cream, even if you've never made ice cream before. It's one of the simplest ice cream/gelato recipes I've come across - no eggs, no cornstarch, no thickening custards. It’s a great recipe to try if you want an easy way to break in a new ice cream maker.
Pro Tips
I’ve learned a number of things about this recipe over the years. Here are a few things to think about if you find yourself making it on repeat.
- Type of Honey: First, you can substantially change the personality of this ice cream by tweaking the honey you use. Patricia uses a deep, rust-toned heather honey from La Maison du Miel for her recipe. I’ve used everything from desert mesquite honey, and olive blossom honey, to (my current favorite) a deep amber buckwheat honey. The ice cream pictured here was made with buckwheat honey.
- In a hurry?: If you're pinched for time, vanilla bean paste is what you need. Use 2 teaspoons of vanilla bean paste in place of the vanilla beans. This allows you to skip the steeping stage. Chill your mixture, then churn, and you’re good to go.
This ice cream is rich and sweet -- just how rich or how sweet will depend in part on the type of honey you end up using. This isn't the sort of ice-cream you are going to turn into a double-scoop cone. A tiny scoop or two with a crispy cookie is a nice way to end a meal.
If you’re interested in Patricia Wells, here are some links! Browse her books. Follow her on Instagram. Or, take a cooking class in France!
More Sorbet and Ice Cream Recipes
- Frosty Lime Sherbet
- Fresh Mint Chip Frozen Yogurt
- Classic Berry Swirl Ice Cream
- Grapefruit Sorbet
- Frozen Yogurt
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Honey Ice Cream Recipe
I often use 2 teaspoons of vanilla paste in place of the vanilla beans here. This allows you to skip the steeping step. If you have the time, by all means use the whole beans, but the shortcut version is equally good!
- 2 plump, moist vanilla beans
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1/2 cup good honey
- 1/4 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
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Flatten the vanilla beans and cut them in half lengthwise. With a small spoon, scrape out the seeds. Place the seeds and pods in a large saucepan. Add the cream, milk, honey, and salt. Stir to dissolve the honey. Heat over moderate heat, stirring from time to time, just until tiny bubbles form around the edges of the pan, 3 to 4 minutes.
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Remove from the heat and let steep, covered, for 1 hour.
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Cover and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. Don’t skip here, really let the mixture get cold.
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Remove the vanilla pods, and stir the mixture again to blend. Transfer it to an ice cream maker and freeze according to manufacturer's instructions.
Adapted over the years from The Paris Cookbook by Patricia Wells (Harper Collins, 2001) - reprinted with permission.
Related Recipes
Classic Berry Swirl Ice Cream
If you love a classic berry swirl ice cream, this is your recipe. Intense, bright strawberry or raspberry sorbet threaded with the creamiest waves of vanilla.
Grapefruit Sorbet
This grapefruit sorbet is inspired by the Paloma cocktail. It is blushingly tart and sweet, a straight-shooting sorbet made with fresh grapefruit juice spiked with a bolt of tequila.
Frosty Lime Sherbet
The trick I use with lime sherbet is to use a bit of orange and lemon alongside fresh lime juice. It takes a bit of the edge off the lime and you end up with a sherbet that tastes like lime tangled with a Creamsicle.
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Heidi,
I just learned the importance of powdered milk in homemade ice creams — hence the inclusion of it in Pierre Herme’s recipe.
In Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking,” which I just got from the library, there is a bit about how home freezing tends to make coarser-textured ice creams. He offers a few suggestions and (scientific explanation) for making a softer, lighter textured ice cream, including the addition of powdered milk! There is of course, a limit to how much you can put in before it works against you, though. It’s fascinating nonetheless, especially since I’ve seen A LOT of ice cream recipes and the Herme one was the only recipe to mention powdered milk.
The chocolate ice cream I made earlier following the Herme recipe, but without the powdered milk, was indeed dense, but in a rich, fudgey kind of way.
ice cream is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and it’s easy to make too, as your recipe proves.
i use the krups also, 5 happy years and counting.
Heidi, how did you know that we got an ice-cream maker for the holidays? So far we’ve made a simple, creamy vanilla bean and just this weekend I did a mocha, requested by my brother for his birthday. Had to invent the recipe, since I couldn’t find one I liked. It looks like honey may be next on my list — I have this delightful “1000 Flowers” honey from Spain that might be just the thing…
Also, Mariko, I’ve read a couple other accounts of the Krups blue leakage issue. So far I’m in the clear with mine but I sort of baby it, by letting it defrost completely on the counter, and then clean it out after it defrosts. Then I put it back in the freezer where it lives. Hopefully it will hold up, as it makes delicious and beautifully textured ice cream and sorbet for me. -h
Holy mackerel, that is the most gorgeous photo of ice cream I have ever seen! My Krups maker never cranked out anything that looked like that! (Speaking of my Krups maker, it began oozing blue stuff, and I had to put it on a shelf in the garage.)
looking gorgeous as usual!
Hello Heidi,
the Pierre Herme recipe calls for 1/3 cup of powdered milk. the book seems to have good adaptations (for the home cook) of his signature recipes. he’s got a note in there about how important it is that chocolate ice cream be made with chocolate, not cocoa, and without eggs, too — he says eggs obscure the taste of the chocolate. it’s nice for people like me who don’t like really eggy ice creams! how nice would the recipe be with a flavored chocolate like the vosges ones…
Hi Fiel…
I’ve had my eye on that book for some time now…I may have to pick it up 🙂
How much powdered milk did that recipe call for? -h
honey ice cream sounds so good! i’m excited about simple ice creams right now, i’m compelled to share — i tried out an amazing and simple ice cream recipe for chocolate ice cream last night out of “Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme” — just milk, dark chocolate and sugar. well, the recipe calls for powdered milk, which i didn’t have, so i made it without, but i really can’t imagine it tasting any better with it. i made the variation with lavender, and it’s really good.
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