Cafe asiatico ice cream
Cartagena's café asiático as ice cream: condensed milk, brandy and Licor 43. Sweet, warming, with the alcohol clearly there.
Café asiático comes from Cartagena and its glass is so distinctive it has a name of its own. It contains coffee, condensed milk, brandy, Licor 43, cinnamon and lemon peel: all six are here.
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
- ·Coffee cold · cinnamon and lemon peel at 40 °C · both spirits after ageing.
- ·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 slightly soft: the spirits lower the freezing point and it stays tender at serving. The condensed milk brings a thick sweetness that carries the whole thing, with cinnamon and lemon showing over the top.
All about this café asiático ice cream
The recipe transfers the whole glass: instant coffee, condensed milk — which is the characteristic dairy sweetness — and brandy and Licor 43. The cinnamon and the lemon peel go in to infuse.
With that the ice cream sits mid-band on fat and solids, with the sweetness slightly high. The serving temperature drops below mid-band: there is liqueur in it, and alcohol does not freeze.
Everything in its moment: the instant coffee cold with the powders, because it brings no water and takes the heat without trouble; the cinnamon and lemon at 40 °C, so they infuse throughout the climb; and the liqueurs at the end, with the base already aged, because at 85 °C the alcohol and the aroma would leave with the steam.
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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