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If You Have an Ice Cream Machine, Pour a Coke in It
COKE SLURPEES AT HOME, y’all.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved Coke Slurpees. When I was a kid, my extremely patient and generous mother would drive me to 7-Eleven whenever I needed a pick-me-up, and if the Coke portion of the flavor selector was broken or overly liquidy, she’d drive me to the next closest 7-Eleven to try again. I once declared that my “dream job” was working at the snack stand at Target, where they pour Coke Icees. When I was 12, I had a Slurpee t-shirt that I wore as often as I was allowed to. It had a drawing of a blue-haired dude upside down and said “brain freeze.” I loved it.
These days, I still love Slurpees but I’m really into making as much of what I consume as possible at home. I’ve made my own vegan cheeses, I pickle veggies, I bake bread. I’m nowhere close to being a completist about it — love you, Field Roast corn dogs — but I always get a thrill out of figuring out how to make from scratch something I was previously buying at the store.
And so it is with great delight that I want to inform you that if you have a simple at-home ice cream maker, you can just put coke in it. Yes, it’s that simple. I have the Whynter ICM-15L S ice cream maker recommended by The Wirecutter, because I do whatever The Wirecutter tells me to do, but any regular ice cream machine should work as far as I know. That said, the Whynter is great and I don’t just use it to make Coke ICEEs — it makes delicious non-dairy ice cream and sorbets and is one of my favorite gadgets in a small kitchen overstuffed with way too many gadgets that only do one thing.
OK, so, I just poured two “real sugar” Mexican Coca-Colas from the bottle into my ice cream maker, ran it for 30 minutes, and spooned the Slurpee-like concoction into one of my favorite glasses, topped with a straw and spoon. It doesn’t taste EXACTLY like a Coke Slurpee — there’s a delicate balance of syrup and other flavors that they are blending there — but it was just as good, and didn’t require me to get anyone to drive me to the local 7-Eleven (I don’t drive).
