You have to take care when flavouring no-churn ice cream not to add too much water. Condensed milk ice creams' high fat and sugar content is part of why they don't get icy, and high-water content flavourings like puréed strawberries or lemon juice will unfortunately alter the texture for the worse. However, adding strong, concentrated flavours – like rose, coffee or vanilla extract – works well. These sort of ice creams are also delicious with a swirl gently mixed into them before freezing, like jam or caramel, or a few mix-ins like chunks of brownie or cheesecake. You can also add some ricotta, cream cheese, mascarpone or any other high-fat dairy you like to add some tang or extra flavour.

There are hundreds of variations on no-churn ice cream out there, and it's a really fun recipe to experiment with. We like the sweetness of the ice cream below, but feel free to play around to find a sweetness that you like. Recipes vary from one part condensed milk to three parts cream (which we found to be too firm and not sweet enough) to four parts condensed milk to three parts cream (which is like frozen frosting!).

Another method that’s popular when making no-churn ice cream is to whip air into eggs. You can whip up just the egg whites, like Kitty Travers, egg whites and yolks together, like Stella Parks, or egg white and yolks separately, like Sam Buckley in his rhubarb ripple ice cream sandwich. There is more variation in technique, ingredients and results with this method than with the condensed milk method. It’s less dependable in some ways – more things can go wrong – but it’s also more flexible.

It’s a more advanced technique to incorporate meringue into whipped cream for Kitty Travers’ method, for example, and it’s easy to inadvertently deflate both the meringue and the cream. However, these recipes are ideal if you want something you can easily quenelle, mould or bite into (like for an ice cream sandwich). Stella Parks’ method results in an incredibly soft ice cream, almost like chilled mousse. If you’re looking for dense, chewy ice cream we’d steer you towards the condensed milk variation, but if you’re someone who prefers soft-serve to gelato, whipped egg no-churn ice cream is a great option. They have the added bonus of not leaving you with a half-used tin of condensed milk too.

There is one final method to make ice cream without an ice cream maker, and that’s to make it with lots of salt and ice. But don’t worry: the ice and salt aren’t going in the ice cream, they’re going around it. 

You might have even done this in school: fill a big plastic bag with ice and salt, place a smaller bag of ice cream base in the centre, shake it around for a bit and there you have it, homemade ice cream. It works because, as you’ve probably seen from the roads being gritted every winter, salt reduces the freezing point of water. This means that when you mix salt and water together, the ice melts into super-chilled water that cools the custard very quickly.

If you fill a metal bowl with ice and salt, and then place a smaller metal bowl with your ice cream base inside it, you have essentially made yourself a homemade ice cream maker for your homemade ice cream. It also allows you to make a much bigger batch than the ziplock bag method. As demonstrated by Adam Ragusea and explained by Faith Durand, when making a standard-size batch of ice cream you need to first whisk the cream for about 10 minutes, then freeze the whole rig for an hour (salt and ice and all), then beat. After the second beating it will collapse and churn into beautiful, soft-serve ice cream, which you can then freeze until firm or serve straightaway.

While this method has the big advantage of working with any standard ice cream recipe (chocolate, strawberry, you name it), it does require a lot of freezer space. However, we found that if you make a mini batch of ice cream (maybe a quarter of a full-size ice cream recipe) you can skip the extra freezing step. The small-batch base gets cold enough that after beating everything with an electric whisk for a few minutes, you end up with almost instant soft-serve ice cream. If you only want a little bit of ice cream, or don't have space for a large bowl in your freezer, then making a smaller batch is a great way to go.