Chocolate sorbet
A chocolate sorbet: water, sugars and dark couverture. No milk, no cream and not a trace of lactose. And it tastes more of chocolate than any chocolate ice cream.
All the fat in the litre comes from the chocolate. The rest of the recipe is water, sugars and a pinch of salt: no protein and no lactose.
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 couverture, on the way down and at 70 °C. Emulsify it properly or it will come out grainy.
- ·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
Dense and dark, cleaner in the mouth than a custard ice cream: with no milk, cocoa butter is the only fat and the cocoa reads in full. It leaves the palate dry at the finish, like a square of dark chocolate.
All about this chocolate sorbet
Calling it a sorbet is misleading, because it carries more fat than many ice creams. But it is a sorbet by full right: not one dairy ingredient. All the fat comes from the couverture, which is why this is one of our three fatty sorbets, alongside the pistachio and the horchata.
And here is the point of it: with no milk to soften it, the cocoa arrives whole. A chocolate ice cream on a dairy base tastes of milk chocolate; this one tastes of dark chocolate. It is drier, more bitter and with a longer finish.
The couverture goes in on the way down, at 70 °C, never on the way up: above 80 the chocolate loses nuance and flattens out. And the sugars are split unusually on purpose — little sucrose and a lot of dextrose — because the couverture itself already brings plenty of sugar.
The ingredients and what each does
The chocolate couverture brings the flavour and its own fat and solids: that's why there's no milk or cream, only water. Sucrose and dextrose set the sweetness and the hardness at serving temperature. Glucose adds body and barely sweetens. Inulin adds solids with almost no sweetness, the job milk would do in an ice cream. The stabiliser holds the free water and stops crystals forming in the freezer.
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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