How To Make A 'Tastee' Root Beer Freeze

When I was growing up in Long Beach, California, one of our favorite places to go for a treat as a family was the Tastee Freez! For those of you from around the area, remember the one next to the car wash on Stearns? They were FAMOUS for their vanilla cones dipped in chocolate, but for ME… they were famous for their Root Beer Freezes!

While everyone else was getting their dipped cones or root beer floats, I had to make sure they got my order right… one root beer FREEZE please. :-) I hadn’t had one for YEARS (decades even!) Until recently, when I had a little “happy accident.”

I had wanted to try a neat idea I saw on The Farmer’s Nest for making Soda Pop Ice Cream. Because you know how much I ADORE pretty much any frozen treat! I’ve seen a couple versions of this “recipe,” one using orange soda and one using strawberry soda.

I ended up trying the orange soda, and let’s just say it was a big sticky FAILURE! (Note to self: TWO LITERS of soda will not fit in a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker!)

Now, most normal people would just chalk the whole Soda Pop ice cream experiment up to experience and move on. Not yours truly! I, of course, couldn’t let it go. I had to try again! But thankfully… this time my relentlessness paid off! In a flash of brilliance I decided to try using root beer, not even thinking about the root beer freezes of my youth.

This time, however, I did things a little differently. I cut the original “recipe” in half. I used 1 liter of soda and a 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk. I also mixed the soda and the sweetened condensed milk in a bowl first before pouring it into the ice cream maker. This got rid of most of the bubbles that contributed to the huge sticky mess I had ended up on my first try.

If you don’t have an ice cream maker, try this method:

Combine the ingredients in a large bowl, and pour the mixture into 13×9 inch baking pan. Place into your freezer for about 1 hour. Then, break the mixture into pieces and dump into a large mixing bowl. Beat the mixture until smooth, then return to the pan, and cover. Freeze until firm.

My experiment worked beautifully! In about 25 minutes I had this frozen concoction that was every bit as good as the ones I remember eating at the Tastee Freez in my youth.