Biscoff ice cream
Lotus inside the ice cream: caramel, cinnamon and toasted biscuit. That flavour everyone recognises and nobody can name.
It is one of the site's three biscuit recipes and the only one without sucrose: Lotus comes caramelised, so the sugar is already in there. Only dextrose and fructose are added, which sweeten less.
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 Lotus biscuit, once the mix drops below 40 °C, and blend until it is worked in.
- ·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 a touch softer than other biscuit ice creams, because the fructose keeps it tender at serving. The Lotus's toasted caramel and cinnamon lead from the start, and the pinch of salt keeps it from getting too sweet.
All about this Lotus biscuit ice cream
Lotus is caramelised sugar, flour and spice, and it goes in generously. It brings so much sugar that the recipe adds no sucrose at all: only dextrose and fructose, which sweeten considerably less, and even so the whole reaches its sweetness.
The cream runs short because the biscuit also brings fat, and the ice cream plants itself on target, with solids among the highest we make. There is a pinch of salt, which with caramel does a great deal.
The biscuit is added below 40 °C and blended: it integrates completely, leaving no pieces.
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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Answers to your questions
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