Coeur de Guanaja chocolate ice cream
Coeur de Guanaja chocolate emulsified cold — the coldest addition on the whole site — and candied cacao nibs as it leaves the machine. Deep, bitter and crunchy.
Valrhona's Coeur de Guanaja is not a conventional couverture: it carries far less cocoa butter, so it gives enormous colour and flavour without loading the ice cream with fat. Hence this recipe adds fat from elsewhere.
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 chocolate, melted separately to 50 °C and emulsified into the mix at 15 °C. The nibs, 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
Intense and very clean on cocoa: built on water rather than milk, there is no dairy fat to cover the chocolate and the flavour arrives direct. The solids hold the body, and the nibs bring the crunch at the finish.
All about this Coeur de Guanaja ice cream
It is the most technical chocolate recipe we have, from the Gelática Ice Concept approach. Coeur de Guanaja brings a great deal of cocoa with little cocoa butter, so the fat has to be supplied separately: refined coconut fat, which goes in at 60 °C, and a little cream.
The chocolate does not go into the pan. It is melted at 50 °C in a separate bowl and, once the mix has come down to 15 °C, it is emulsified there with a little of the mixture before pouring everything together. It is a cold emulsion, and that is why it turns out so silky.
The caramelised cocoa nibs from the preliminary prep are folded in as it leaves the machine. They are not part of the recipe's balance: they go in as a topping, outside the mix.
This recipe is from Gelática Ice Concept, the gelateria of Migue Señorís and Carmen Prado. Thank you for sharing it.
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.