Black liquorice ice cream
Real black liquorice: aniseedy and intense, almost black, with that flavour you either love or avoid.
Black liquorice sweets are sugar, molasses and anethole — the aroma of aniseed. That is why this recipe contains not a gram of sucrose: the sweetness is already there.
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 liquorice, crushed and added at 40 °C on the way down. Not before, not after.
- ·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 dense, with the springy quality the liquorice itself brings as it melts into the hot milk. The fructose keeps it soft and the aniseed rises at the finish, long and with a faintly saline echo.
All about this black liquorice ice cream
The base is textbook — milk and cream, mid-band on fat — and the lead is black liquorice, the soft kind, the bars and the wheels.
Since liquorice is a confection, the recipe only adds dextrose and fructose, and not a trace of table sugar. It still reaches its sweetness and sits well on solids, with the serving temperature where it should be.
The trick is in the timing and the form: while the mix is cooling, the liquorice goes through the processor, and once chopped it is added on reaching 40 °C. At that temperature it melts and blends in; cold it stays rubbery, and hot it loses the anethole, which is volatile.
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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