Black sesame ice cream
Black sesame paste: ash grey, toasted and slightly saline. Barely sweet, with a fine bitterness that gets you.
Black sesame is not dyed white sesame: it is a different variety and it is ground with the hull on. That hull supplies the colour and almost all the toasted bitterness.
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 sesame paste, on the way up: after the stabiliser at 40 °C and before 85.
- ·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
Silky and dense, with the dry edge sesame paste leaves as it releases its fat. It carries little cream because the sesame supplies it, and the roast turns slightly bitter at the finish, like a praline without the sweetness.
All about this black sesame ice cream
The black sesame paste goes in generously and it is what leads: it supplies flavour, colour and a good part of the fat. Between it, the whole milk and the cream, the ice cream plants itself in the fat band and mid-band on solids.
The sugars are split three ways: sucrose in front, dextrose behind and a touch of 21 DE dried glucose. Dextrose is what lowers the freezing point without raising sweetness, and together they leave the ice cream at our house sweetness and nicely soft on the palate, which is what a bitter flavour needs.
The sesame is added on the way up, after the stabiliser at 40 °C and before reaching 85. The heat and the blender disperse it; added cold it leaves threads of paste that you notice later.
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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