Coco Loco ice cream
Coconut and white rum: tropical, rich and with the alcohol showing. The beach-bar cocktail turned into ice cream.
Desiccated coconut is dry and thirsty. Added at 85 °C it hydrates instantly and releases its fat into the mix; cold it would stay hard and gritty however much you blend 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 coconut at 85 °C, as it comes off the heat. The rum, after ageing, right before churning.
- ·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 soft at serving, because the rum loosens the mix and stops it firming up completely. The coconut is very present in the mouth and the spirit shows up behind, without taking over the mouthful.
All about this coco loco ice cream
Two ingredients and two opposite moments. The desiccated coconut goes in hot, straight off the heat, so it hydrates and gives up its fat. The rum is saved for the end, after ageing: alcohol is volatile and in the heat it would leave with the steam.
With all that coconut the ice cream plants itself high in fat with almost no cream, because desiccated coconut is largely fat.
The rum leaves the serving temperature well below normal: this ice cream stays softer in the freezer than the rest. It pays to scrape the walls of the machine with a silicone spatula while it churns.
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.
Ad links: we link to Amazon. We are not an Amazon affiliate in your market yet, so we earn nothing from these links.
Answers to your questions
Frequently asked questions
Other recipes
you might like
Missing a sugar?
Tick the one you haven't got and which alternatives you do have. We'll tell you whether you can make it with what's there.