At last, complete success!

So when I first started making ice cream this summer I couldn't quite get the texture right. The ice cream tasted great, but wasn't nearly as smooth as I would have liked. As it turns out, the major problem was that I was being impatient and wasn't leaving the custard in the fridge to chill long enough. So in the past few weeks I've made some highly delicious mint chocolate chip ice cream (although I still can't get the chips quite how I'd like them). 

This weekend though, Wendy asked me to make chocolate ice cream again and since she's leaving in just over a week for vet school I figured I'd better oblige in a hurry. So I bought this Icelandic Nói Síríus chocolate at Whole Foods and set out to try it out. I'd never had the chocolate before but I liked their packaging (two chocolate bars wrapped in wax paper, with a simple width of white paper wrapped around everything) and it was a good amount, so I figured why not. Then when I got home and actually tasted a piece of the chocolate I was dismayed to realize it was, well, not fabulous. Fortunately, once it was melted and blended into the custard the flavor was improved as was the texture.

I cooked the custard a bit longer than usual this time around--just a minute or so but it thickened up better. By the end of its time in the fridge it had thickened enough that I couldn't just pour it out but instead needed to use a spatula. That's probably the thickness it was always supposed to have, but I hadn't been getting it there before. 

The final result, once frozen, was a dense, wonderfully smooth ice cream and while it could have a bit more depth of flavor to it to be truly perfect, it's still pretty damn excellent.