Cherry ice cream
Cherry pulp on a dairy base: dark, sweet and with the tart edge the fruit never loses.
It is the house ice cream with the most fruit per litre: nearly half. That is why the base is so heavy on cream, to hold up all that fruit water.
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 cherry pulp goes in with the mix already cold, at 4 °C.
- ·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 well coated, because here the cream outweighs the milk. That base holds the fruit's water without ice showing through, and the cherry's acidity cuts across it and leaves a fresh finish.
Everything about this cherry ice cream
With nearly half of it pulp, the fruit is in charge. The base is built with plenty of cream and little milk: you need fat and solids to make up for the water the cherry brings, and even so the ice cream lands right on target, for fat and for solids.
The sugars split between dextrose and sucrose up to their sweetness. The serving temperature sits in the middle of the band.
The pulp goes in with the mix already cold. There is a lighter version for anyone who would rather taste more fruit and less cream.
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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