Homemade ice cream texture gritty, sandy? Made my own ice cream today using one of the Cuisnart ice cream machines. Followed the recipe down to a T and after trying out the ice cream it had this disgusting sandy, gritty texture to it.

Recipe:


  1½     cups whole milk
  1    cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
       pinch table salt
  3    cups heavy cream
  1½   tablespoons pure vanilla extract
  
  In a medium bowl, use a hand mixer on low speed or whisk to
  combine the milk, sugar and salt until the sugar is dissolved. Stir
  in the heavy cream and vanilla. Cover and refrigerate 1 to 2
  hours, or overnight.
  
  Turn the Cuisinart® Ice Cream Maker on; pour the mixture into
  the frozen freezer bowl and let mix until thickened, about 30 to
  35 minutes. The ice cream will have a soft, creamy texture. If
  a firmer consistency is desired, transfer the ice cream to an airtight
  container and place in freezer for about 2 hours. Remove
  from freezer about 15 minutes before serving.


Did I do something wrong?
It sounds very much like you didn't manage to completely dissolve the sugar. It's also possible to get a bad texture from ice crystals in your ice cream, but I don't think you'd describe it as gritty or sandy, just icy.

It can be rather difficult to dissolve that much sugar in liquid, especially if it's cold straight from the fridge. You might want to try heating it gently and stirring, and being careful to go until there's no undissolved sugar hiding at the bottom. That does make the chilling take a bit longer, probably more like 4-8 hours or overnight, not just 1-2 hours. But in my experience heating to dissolve is pretty much standard in ice cream recipes, presumably because it's about the only way to do it easily.

Note that if you do heat it, using only part of the liquid (say one cup out of a total of three cups) is probably best. That way there's still plenty of liquid for it to dissolve quickly, but you aren't heating it all, so you can add in two more cups of cold liquid and cool it back off so it'll be chilled enough to freeze sooner.