Wheat beer, vanilla and salted caramel ice cream
Paulaner, vanilla and salted caramel: sweet and toasted with a saline edge that lifts it. Very unctuous thanks to the butter.
Beer brings alcohol, and alcohol does not freeze. That is why the serving temperature drops to the most extreme of any custard on the site: this ice cream stays softer than any other at the same temperature.
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
- ·The beer ice cold, at 30 °C. The caramel uses 2/3 of the sucrose; the other third is ground with the vanilla.
- ·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
Soft and dense at once: the Paulaner's alcohol softens it and the caramel's butter gives the body back. The result sits between salted caramel and the wheat of the beer, and is highly aromatic.
All about this Paulaner, vanilla and salted caramel ice cream
It is the recipe with the most steps we have, and not on a whim. The sucrose is split: a third is ground with the vanilla pod and kept mixed with the stabiliser; the other two thirds are caramelised over low heat in the very pan where the mix will be made.
Onto that caramel goes the softened butter, little by little — as in a toffee — and then the milk, watching that the mixture does not go past 40 °C before the powders are added. It is the salt that turns the caramel into salted caramel.
The Paulaner beer, put in the freezer beforehand, goes in at 30 °C: good and cold it chills the mix at a stroke and loses less aroma. With a 5.5° beer and in that quantity the PAC drops well below normal, so it pays to scrape the walls of the machine with a silicone spatula 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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