Vanilla Gelato

We had a wonderful trip to France and Italy over Christmas.  Because of that, gelato has already been requested a number of times.  For Molly and Ben's birthday we made really nice vanilla gelato and raspberry sorbet.  Homemade ice cream is kind of hit or miss with me, but these both worked out really well.  Great texture and flavor.  This is adapted from a recipe for Sicilian Gelato on icecreamnation.com.  I doubled it and ever so slightly tweaked it.  It was a little much for the icecream maker, but i just scooped some out and added the additional liquid.

Ingredients:

3 cups whole milk
3 cups cream
1 cup sugar (I didn't try other sweeteners)
5 tablespoons of cornstarch (or other)
vanilla bean ( I used my last one)

Directions:

1.  Pour the cream, about two cups of the milk and the sugar into a pan.  Stir and then add the split and scraped vanilla bean.
2.   Heat until hot, but not boiling.
3.  Add the cornstarch to the remaining milk and stir together.
4.  When the mixture in the pan is very hot, add the cornstarch mixture.  Cook for 4-5 minutes, until it thickens.  The recipe said not to let it boil.
5.  Cool it and keep in the fridge until your ready to freeze it.  When you pour it into the ice cream maker, remove the vanilla bean.
6.  Freeze in the ice cream maker until ready and then put in the freezer for 1-3 hours.