You need only four ingredients to make ice cream—and NO ice cream maker.

There may be an extra ingredient, such as lemon juice with fruit flavors.

Just whip the cream, fold it into the sweetened condensed milk with the other ingredients, freeze in a loaf pan and voilà, ice cream!

The other ingredients are sugar or other sweetener (use Splenda for sugar-free ice cream), and flavor: coffee, cocoa, peanut butter, strawberry, vanilla, etc.). With some recipes, other ingredients substitute for the sugar; for example, a box of cake mix for cake batter ice cream.

Then, of course, there are optional mix-ins: brownie chunks, chocolate chips, crushed Oreos, fruit, M&Ms, nuts, sprinkles, etc.
 
 
NO-CHURN VS. CONVENTIONAL ICE CREAM

Traditional ice cream starts with a sweetened base—usually a combination of heavy cream, milk and sugar and sugar (add eggs for a French custard base).

The custard and added flavors are churned in an ice cream maker, which incorporates air and breaks up ice crystals as they form, creating a creamy texture. The mixture is then frozen.

No-churn ice cream uses sweetened condensed milk as the base. The whipped cream adds the air and produces the creamy texture.

The result is very similar, with a few minor differences:

 
 
NO-CHURN ICE CREAM RECIPES

For most no-churn recipes, prep time is less than 10 minutes, plus 4-5 hours freezing time.

[2] Blackberry ice cream (here’s the recipe from Baked By An Introvert).

Alas, we could not find the origin of no-churn ice cream. This bugs us, because it is a relatively recent recipe—no reaching into the distant past required.

Our best guess is that it is Eagle Brand Borden sweetened condensed milk, which is constantly testing new recipes for its product.

There are no-churn recipes on their website, but we hadn’t heard back from them by press time. We’ll update this when we do.

Borden and Eagle brand, the two big names in sweetened condensed milk, merged and are now owned by Smucker’s.

Here’s the history of sweetened condensed milk.