Churros and chocolate ice cream
Proper churrería churros inside the ice cream: frying, sugar and soft dough. Sunday teatime in a scoop.
A churro is flour and frying oil, little else. Blended into the mix it releases that fat, which is why the ice cream climbs in fat content without a scrap of butter in it.
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 churros, below 40 °C, and blend thoroughly. The sauce, as it leaves the machine.
- ·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 noticeably soft straight out of the freezer: that is the fructose, higher here than usual. The churro dissolves and leaves the fried base note, and the chocolate goes its own way, dense, never quite blending in.
All about this churros and chocolate ice cream
These are two preparations. The base has the churro blended into it, below 40 °C; the chocolate sauce is made separately, with cream, Callebaut and a double emulsion, and is rippled in at the end.
Among the sugars, the fructose stands out: far more of it, nearly four times the sucrose. It sweetens more and lowers the freezing point sharply, which is exactly what an ice cream with this much flour solid in it needs in order not to set hard.
The sauce is kept in a squeeze bottle: that way you ripple it in one pass, without it cooling and without covering half the kitchen.
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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