Ben & Jerry's®

When Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield first met in their seventh-grade gym class, they quickly became good friends. After college the two decided they wanted to try their hand at selling ice cream. With $12,000 to invest, they moved from New York to Burlington, Vermont, where they purchased an abandoned gas station as the first location for their ice cream store.

After passing a five-dollar correspondence course on ice cream making from Pennsylvania State University and spending their life savings on renovating the gas station, the two were officially in the ice cream business. Ben and Jerry opened the doors to their first ice cream parlor in 1978. The pair's ice cream was such a big hit that they soon moved to a much larger facility. Today, just fifteen years after opening day, they produce more that 500,000 gallons of ice cream each month.

Heath Bar Crunch was one of the earliest flavors on the menu and is still the most popular of the thirty original chunky ice cream creations that made them famous. Try making this Ben and Jerry's favorite yourself with our Heath Bar ice cream recipe below!

Source: Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Re-creating this popular frozen ice pop is more than just mixing sugar and cocoa into skim milk and freezing it with a stick in the middle. In addition to the great chocolate taste, a Fudgsicle copycat recipe wouldn't be right if it didn't have the same creamy–and not at all icy–texture of the original.

So how do we hack that? We'll use a little gelatin in the mix plus some fat-free half-and-half, which contains carrageenan a natural thickener found in the real fudge bars that improves the texture and helps prevent the formation of ice crystals. 

For my Fudgsicle Fudge Bars copcyat recipe, simply combine the ingredients below in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, then pour the creamy mixture into an ice pop mold. When the pops are semisolid, add the sticks. A few hours later, you'll have seven or eight perfect fudge pops with the same great taste and mouthfeel as the famous original product.

Find more of my cool snack copycat recipes here.

Source: "Top Secret Recipes Step-by-Step" by Todd Wilbur.

If I told you that Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Ice Cream was formulated generations ago on a dairy farm in the rolling hills of Denmark, you’d probably believe me. It sounds true because that’s precisely what Rueben Mattus wanted you to think when he created his new ice cream brand in 1960. In the Bronx in New York City.

Mattus used a marketing technique called “foreign branding.” To set his brand apart from others, Mattus created the impression that his new ice cream was an exotic, special recipe made with hard-to-obtain ingredients. To come up with the name, Mattus sat at his kitchen table in the mornings blurting out non-sensical words until he eventually landed on one that sounded Danish: Häagen-Dazs. The word is meaningless, it’s not Dutch, and it even includes an umlaut, which doesn’t exist in the Danish alphabet.

While the name may suggest a fancy, complicated recipe for ice cream, the Häagen-Dazs label is one of the simplest and cleanest you'll find for any major ice cream brand. There are just five very ordinary ingredients and nothing else: cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, vanilla extract. And those will be the ingredients we’ll use in our hack.

To create my Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Ice Cream copycat recipe, I played with the ratios through many batches until I finally honed in on the right combination for a perfect French vanilla ice cream, prepared like custard, but with less egg, and just enough butterfat to re-create the smooth mouthfeel of the original.

Cook your ice cream base with the simple instructions, then get it cold and into an ice cream maker. After 30 minutes of churning grab a spoon, because you'll have a heaping quart of the best homemade ice cream you’ve ever tasted, and it's best when served a little soft.

Try using your freshly made ice cream in one of my famous shake recipes here.