Citrus cocktail ice cream
Mandarin, orange, lemon and lime on a dairy base: citrus but creamy, with the acidity rounded off.
With this much juice on a dairy base, the split is what averts disaster: the third that cooks goes in well accompanied by hot milk, and the two raw thirds arrive when there is no longer any risk of curdling anything.
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
- ·Juices split: 1/3 hot with the base · 2/3 at 4 °C. And it is strained 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 very fresh at once: the base is nearly all cream and milk solids, so it has body to spare for holding the juice without turning to ice. The citrus cuts that fat and leaves the palate clean.
All about this citrus cocktail ice cream
It is a citrus ice cream with dairy, which is not easy: it is a lot of juice across mandarin, orange, lemon and lime, and acid and milk do not get on when hot. Hence the split: one third of the juices is heated with the milk and cream, and the remaining two thirds go in at 4 °C.
There are two versions. The richer one is loaded with cream and is the creamy one. The lighter one drops the cream and compensates with 38 DE glucose and a little more stabiliser: it comes out looser and with the citrus further forward.
Both reach the same solids and hover around the same sweetness. And both are strained after ageing, to leave the pulp out.
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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