What Makes Philadelphia-Style Ice Cream So Different?

While you may not have heard of Philadelphia-style ice cream, you've almost certainly enjoyed a scoop of it. While many people may think it has something to do with cream cheese, Philadelphia-style ice cream is actually just crafted with milk, cream, and sugar. So why was this style of ice cream named after the city of Brotherly Love? According to America's Test Kitchen, we have Augustus Jackson to thank. The chef worked in the White House during the Andrew Jackson administration before returning to his hometown of Philadelphia, where he was the first to craft the eggless recipe.

As a trained pastry chef who has been making ice cream professionally for over ten years, here's the scoop. Traditional "French-style" ice cream bases are made using eggs. And while an egg custard gives an ice cream body and a rich, creamy finish, it can also make it challenging for subtle flavors to shine through. Philadelphia-style is a lighter take on the frozen treat. Because this style of ice cream base doesn't require cooking and cooling custard before freezing, it can take just minutes before you have your own ice cream churning at home. It's fast, tastes unbelievably fresh and can instantly make you feel more confident making your own ice cream.

While a Philadelphia-style ice cream can be ready quickly, it needs to be eaten soon after churning. According to Ice Cream Science, egg yolks act as natural emulsifiers and stabilizers in ice cream, which provide a smoother texture and prevent ice crystal formation. While a traditional egg custard can stand up in even the most temperamental of freezers, Philadelphia-style ice cream needs to be eaten within a couple of days, or else the fluffy treat can become crunchy.

As long as you have plans to eat the ice cream fast (a tough ask, right?), making a recipe using a Philadelphia-style ice cream base is an easy way to spin up a flavor to complement any pie or test your creativity using different ingredients. This kind of ice cream base is best for making fruit-forward flavors, like raspberry, blueberry or strawberry. It's the perfect canvas to craft a flavor when you want a subtle ingredient to shine, like fresh mint, basil or even infusing tea into your milk before crafting the base. If you're really feeling adventurous, you can also substitute some of the fat in the recipe for another form of dairy, such as ricotta or creme fraîche.

If you want to try your hand at crafting Philly-style ice cream, the good news is that despite the lack of eggs, you won't need to operate your ice cream machine any differently. It's rare to find a home ice cream machine that will allow you to select different settings depending on the kind you're looking to make. The only variables during the freezing process are the speed at which the dasher rotates and the length of time that you allow a batch to churn. The dasher speed allows users to control the size of ice crystals — "good" ice cream has lots of smaller ice crystals, whereas "bad" ice cream has fewer, larger crystals. 

The other variable in your control is how much air is being incorporated into the product. This is called overrun, and it determines how fluffy (as opposed to dense) the ice cream is when it's finished. If you leave an ice cream base in to churn for too long, it will be over-spun, which will result in a firm, gritty and almost butter-like texture and if you don't churn it enough, it will not have enough air. A telltale sign that your ice cream is ready for transferring to a container is that it's beginning to pull away from the sides of the machine's freezing chamber.