What's The Best Mint To Use For Homemade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream?

Mint chocolate chip ice cream is twice as refreshing as the regular stuff, with little shreds of chocolate folded into a cooling, crisp, minty base. It's a playful combo of flavors that's easy to make at home — and customizable with all kinds of mix-ins — like some crushed Oreos that'll make your mint chocolate chip ice cream taste like a classic Dairy Queen Blizzard. Most mint chocolate chip ice creams are flavored with spearmint or peppermint, but there are many varieties of mint you could use. You likely won't be using fresh mint leaves, though, unless you want them for a garnish. While a few recipes do use fresh leaves, the majority of them use mint extract to get that fresh minty flavor. And a professional ice cream maker we talked to said his secret is mint oil.

Tyler Malek, co-founder and head ice cream maker of Salt & Straw, said the iconic ice cream company (it even has locations at Disneyland) exclusively uses Oregon grown mint oil in its mint chocolate chip ice cream. "Seely Family Farms is one of my favorites," Malek said. "Mint oil is drastically different from mint extract — for one pint of ice cream, you need one dropper of the mint oil. It will make a world of difference in quality and flavor of your product."

There are many riffs off of mint chocolate chip ice cream, like dairy-free versions and recipes that use crushed peppermint candy. It's served in a bowl or in an epic ice cream sandwich. And there's that debate about whether it has to be green. But a great batch of mint chocolate chip ice cream does have a few signature qualities — most importantly, every bite must be minty.

Tyler Malek's tip for evenly flavored ice cream is to add mint oil into the ice cream base just before putting it into the machine. "That way you ensure it gets fully emulsified into the ice cream and you get a pure mint flavor through and through," he said. You'll want a rockstar recipe for an ice cream base you can use as a starting point, like a vanilla ice cream (make it Philadelphia-style if you want to skip the eggs). Or, take a page from Salt & Straw's cookbook: "America's Most Iconic Ice Creams" and use the ice cream shop's recipe for a base.

"At Salt and Straw, our position is that if you have a really, really great base recipe, then you can be as creative as you want with flavors and mix ins," Malek said. "We've created our famous 17% butter fat ice cream base, which is really simple to use. You can make an unlimited amount of flavors based off of that one recipe. It's also probably the most simple to make at home."