Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream

That nostalgic scoop from the ice cream parlor, the one with cold pockets of soft cookie dough, is surprisingly easy to make at home. The base is an eggless ice cream custard, no tricky tempering involved, just scalded milk, sugar, half and half, vanilla, and a generous pour of heavy cream for that dense, scoopable richness.

Scalding the milk first helps the sugar and salt dissolve completely, so the base churns up smooth instead of grainy.

Timing the cookie dough matters. You churn the base to a soft-serve consistency first, then break the dough into small clusters and fold them in by hand, spreading them evenly before the final freeze.

A few hours in the freezer firms everything up, and those dough nuggets stay soft and chewy even straight from the cold, the textural contrast that makes this flavor a forever favorite.

Pro Tips

• For food safety, use edible cookie dough made without raw eggs and with heat-treated flour, since the dough goes in uncooked.
• Chill the base thoroughly before churning; a cold base freezes faster and stays smoother.
• Add the dough only once the ice cream reaches soft-serve stage, or it will sink and clump at the bottom.
• Press plastic wrap directly onto the surface before the final freeze to keep ice crystals from forming.

Variations

• Use chocolate cookie dough or peanut butter dough in place of classic chocolate chip.
• Swirl in fudge ripple or caramel along with the dough.
• Fold in extra mini chocolate chips for more crunch in every bite.