American Style Ice Cream

The whole of the ice cream manufacture in the United States makes American-style ice cream, commercially and at home. Equated with the French-style ice cream, American-style ice cream uses only milk and/or cream. It is also eggless. The Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) calls this ice cream case as hard, orthodox or regular ice cream. Its most typical feature is its richness and refinement with a texture that’s thick and hard.





ice cream from pierre salinger

American-style ice cream owes this texture from all the milk and cream used as basic ingredients, aside from the sugar and seasoning from fruits, vanilla bean, chocolate, blueberries, and more. In fact national law in the United States, the greatest consumer of ice cream in the world, require all frozen products called ice cream to have at least 10% milkfat.


The American-style ice cream is also famous as “standard” or Philadelphia-style ice cream, in honor of the artificer of the first commercial ice cream manufacturer, Nancy Johnson, a Philadelphia native, according to writer Annmarie Kostyk in “Styles of Ice Cream” from the Yahoo! Network. Johnson patented her machine in1843, as spotlighted by the Wikipedia.

Perhaps the name also started from Philadelphia being famous for its eggless ice creams in the beginning of the 1800s, as determined in a glossary of terms by the California Milk Advisory Board. The late American chef and food writer James Beard notes Philadelphia as the ice cream capital of the world, in a 1971 newspaper article registered in Food Timeline. When one says Philadelphia ice cream, it meant ice cream of the finest quality during those times.

The flavor of American-style ice cream is not overpowering, says Kostyk. “The flavor of the cream comes across and the add-on such as fruits, nuts and seasonings such as vanilla, coffee or rum complement the cream.” An example of an American-style ice cream recipe involves waking part of the heavy cream with sugar and salt in a saucepan. For vanilla flavored ice cream, the seeds scraped from a vanilla bean are added into the mixture at this point. The mixture is heated and stirred until sugar is melted. It is then added to the other half of the cream, milk and vanilla. It is chilled first before freezing in an ice cream maker.