Brown butter ice cream
Brown butter, nutty and caramelised, on a very milky base. Short on ingredients and long on flavour.
The caramel smell that appears as the butter browns does not come from sugar: it is its milk solids toasting. And those same solids, unfiltered, keep on turning bitter inside the ice cream.
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 brown butter, as you take it off the heat, at 85 °C, then emulsify well with the blender.
- ·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
Very creamy and slow-melting, with brown butter as the only fat and the milk solids carrying the body. The nutty roast fills the mouth and the salt holds it all the way through.
All about this brown butter ice cream
This is a single-flavour ice cream, and that flavour is made before you start: butter over medium heat until it smells of hazelnut, sieved and then filtered through kitchen paper to leave nothing but clean fat. That is where the brown butter the recipe calls for comes from.
The base has neither milk nor cream: water and milk powder. All the fat comes from the butter, and the ice cream plants itself practically at the top of the band. It is one of the richest we make and you feel it on the palate.
The sugars are split between sucrose, dextrose and fructose, and it carries salt, which with the toasted note works the way it does in salted caramel.
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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