Best of tropical Singapore style ice cream: How to macerate fresh mango for Mango Ice Cream

So how do you macerate fresh mango for The Simplest Mango Ice Cream recipe? Well, it is really pretty easy:

Step 1: Slice mango in half and use a metal spoon to thinly scoop out the flesh. Toss out the large seed and do the same for the other half.

Step 2: Mix one mango with 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar in bowl (really depends on how sweet you want it or how big and sweet your mango is).

Step 3: Mix mango and sugar evenly by tossing them about. Add about 1 tablespoon of lime or lemon juice and toss together. The acid from the lime or lemon juice prevents the mango from oxidising.

Step 4: Transfer macerated mango into a holding bowl or container and store in fridge for at least 2 hours or up to a day before use. It should produce a lot of liquid by now.

Once you're done with macerating, just follow The Simplest Mango Ice Cream recipe and you are pretty much on your way to a wonderfully tangy tropical flavoured fruit ice cream!

Note: Pick the fleshiest mango you can find! If not, you might have to use 2 skinny mangoes instead of 1!

Ice cream fail: How to make ice cream that will cause you diabetes

I was flipping through an old issue of a supposedly authoritative food magazine and got the shock of my life.

There was a little feature about making ice cream at home and this was one of the recipes they provided: To make 1 litre of Basil Ice Cream, you need 500g of sugar!

This means that half of the total weight of ice cream is actually made out of sugar!

No doubt you will get an ice cream with a super smooth texture because there is a lot of sugar used (Remember: More sugar used, the smoother the texture). But I don't know how is it possible to consume an ice cream that is this sweet. And I can't imagine how it is even possible to taste the basil.

Eating this will make you sick. Epic fail. Period.

Can I make ice cream without any sugar?

Well, no.

Sugar is necessary not just to make ice cream sweet and palatable but also soft and scoopable.

This is because sugar freezes at a much lower temperature compared to a liquid such as water, and it is this low freezing point that allows sugar to remain as a viscous substance even when it is in the freezer.

Therefore, by adding more sugar to your ice cream, more of your ice cream is not frozen up completely, and you are effectively making it softer.

Ice cream that contains very little or no sugar becomes very hard, icy and grainy. Most of the time, ice cream with little or no sugar becomes impossible to scoop when in a frozen state.

The mouth feel of zero sugar ice cream is also not desirable. It is crumbly and too coarse.

What is butterfat? Is it true that I get gelato when I cut down the amount of butterfat?

Butterfat is derived from whipping cream and full cream milk. It is one of the main substances that makes ice cream, well, ice cream.

Ice cream should have at least 10% of butterfat in its content, which explains why ice cream has a rich creamy taste and texture. (Although not everyone (expert ice cream makers included) can agree at what minimal level of butterfat content ice cream should contain before ice cream ceases to be ice cream. This is more of a philosophical question, like "When does a tree cease to be a tree? When it loses all its leaves? Its branches fall off? It loses its bark? Its trunk?")

So what if there is lesser butterfat when you intentionally cut it out of ice cream? Well, technically, you might think you get gelato as gelato contains about 7% butterfat. However, the catch is that you cannot say you have created gelato just by cutting down on the amount of butterfat content.

There are simply too many other factors to consider. This is so as gelato can have a higher sugar content as compared to ice cream (to compensate for the lack of butterfat among other reasons), but it is a fact that gelato has a denser consistency due to lesser air being incorporated into it (up to 50% less than ice cream, some might say).

Simply put, ice cream and gelato are made differently, and the difference in butter fat is just one difference.

But you can always try it out on your own. Experiment making ice cream with half the required amount of whipping cream and what you have is definitely not ice cream and definitely not gelato either.

So the one thing you can take away from this is: Reducing the butterfat from ice cream DOES NOT automatically give you gelato. You need to take other factors of ice cream and gelato creation into consideration.

You can read more about the difference between ice cream and other frozen desserts here.