Baileys ice cream
Baileys and coffee: creamy, sweet, with the alcohol showing at the finish. An after-dinner dessert.
Baileys is already an Irish cream with dairy and sugar, so it does not come in only as alcohol: it brings fat and sweetness. That is why the base is built on water instead of milk, to leave it room.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
Need to adjust the formula?
Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·Instant coffee cold · the Baileys after ageing, before churning.
- ·Do not skip the cold ageing: it hydrates proteins and stabiliser and clearly improves the texture.
- ·The serving temperature depends on your recipe: if you formulate to a softer PAC than your freezer (say -11 °C with the chest at -18 °C), temper it for 5–10 min before serving; if the PAC matches your freezer, it can be eaten straight out.
- ·Why formulate at -11 and not at -18 °C: even though your freezer sits at -18 °C, formulating at -11 makes the ice cream tastes better — at -18 it is so cold that the taste buds barely pick up the flavour and the fat is slow to melt in the mouth. And keeps better: ice cream formulated at -11 and kept at -18 has less free water, suffers less from Ostwald ripening (ice crystals joining and growing) and keeps its creaminess longer.
- ·Keep your own notes: write down the POD and PAC that work best with your machine.
The texture
spot on
Creamy and noticeably soft: the alcohol lowers the freezing point and it never fully hardens, so it is served almost spoonable. The cream rounds the opening and behind it come the coffee and the whiskey, without the spirit ever burning.
All about this Baileys ice cream
The base has no milk: water, cream and milk powder. The gap is filled by the Baileys, which already brings cream, sugar and whiskey. Even so, the ice cream lands mid-band on both fat and solids.
The instant coffee is not decoration: Baileys has a coffee-and-cocoa base note, and the instant underlines it without adding water. It goes in cold, with the powders.
The liqueur goes in after the 12 to 24 h of ageing. The serving temperature drops below mid-band, so this ice cream comes out softer than usual: as with the Guinness one, it helps to scrape the walls of the machine while it churns.
The ingredients and what each does
Every ingredient has a technical job: cream brings fat and creaminess, milk powder raises the non-fat solids, the sugars set the sweetness and the freezing point, and the stabiliser controls crystal growth during storage.
Technique and controlling the numbers
Adjusting the POD (sweetening power) and the PAC (antifreezing power, given as a target temperature) lets you match sweetness and hardness to your taste and your machine. With the selectors in the side bar the formula recalculates itself and you will see how the amount of each ingredient changes.
Storage and common mistakes
Store at -18 °C in an airtight container and avoid freeze-thaw cycles. The commonest faults are not ageing it enough, too much sugar so it never freezes properly, and over-churning, which whips in too much air and wrecks the texture.
Recommended for this recipe
Equipment and ingredients that make the difference.
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