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We had been meaning to make ice cream with the boys all summer, but summer was too busy (or too lazy, take your pick) so we never did that. They did manage to make ice cream with their grandmother, but that was during the day while I was at work, so I didn’t get any of it.

Now that it is the day after Labor Day and school has started, we finally made ice cream at our house. The recipe that we used calls for zip-type plastic baggies, a cheap substitute for the near-indestructible wood and metal ice cream maker that my parents used when I was a kid.

For those not familiar with the plastic-bag method: pour the ingredients into a small plastic bag and seal it, put ice and salt and the small plastic bag into a large plastic bag and seal it, then shake/roll/toss the large plastic bag for several minutes. Here is a picture of the first step.

Apparently, it went fine the first time the kids tried it, at their grandmother’s house. Today, I got to try it with them here, after dinner (“you kids want dessert? Okay, but you have to make it yourselves.”)

Our recipe didn’t say anything about double-bagging the ice cream mixture. I highly recommend using two bags for the ice cream and two bags for the brine solution.

“Why?” you ask.

One reason is that we inadvertently got the extra-pointy ice from our freezer. A couple minutes into the last step, I noticed that the salt/ice mixture was turning brown. I was making chocolate ice cream, and I expected the chocolate to stay in the ice cream. The zip fastener was sealed (I checked), so I just kept going and hoped that the salt wasn’t leaking into the ice cream.

Another reason is that the table was getting wet while I was trying to get the ice cream to freeze. At first it was no big deal – I figured it was just condensation. But the other bag didn’t have that problem. My wife held up the bag and we watched it drip, drip, drip. We double-bagged the whole thing and didn’t have any more problems.

Just double-bag everything beforehand. Or pay extra for the high-quality dull ice. Or just use an old-school, industrial-strength ice cream machine.

One more thing – rinse off the ice cream baggies after you take them out of the brine. The middle child made it about halfway through his ice cream and then was done eating. I hated to see ice cream go to waste, so I started eating it. I took 3 bites, and 2 of them had a granule of salt. Biting into a chunk of salt is not good when you’re expecting strawberry ice cream flavor. I don’t know that biting into a chunk of salt is a good idea any other time either.

Double bagging may help with keeping the salt off the inner bag, but I’d still recommend rinsing off the ice cream bag. Hint: use cold water, otherwise you’ll undo all the work that it took to make the ice cream.