Coffee ice cream
Real coffee and egg yolk: bitter, roasted and very creamy. Plus a second version with instant, for when there is no time to steep.
The good version is also the cheaper one, well below the instant version. Steeping beans pays off because it replaces milk with coffee water.
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
- ·Strain the coffee water thoroughly before using it: any grounds that slip into the mix read as grit on the tongue.
- ·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 full-bodied, though lighter than it looks: part of the liquid is water, which lets the coffee read clean instead of being buried under fat. In the yolk version everything rounds out and the melt lengthens.
All about this coffee ice cream
Coffee is one of the flavours heat damages most. Extract it hot and then pasteurise on top and you get a bitter ice cream that tastes of grounds. That is why the main version steeps the beans in cold water: coffee in water, strained, and out of it comes the coffee water that goes into the recipe.
That water replaces part of the milk, and there lies the trick of the arithmetic: the recipe lowers the milk and raises the milk powder so as not to lose solids or protein. The result is a high protein, well above that of a cream ice cream.
The second version uses instant coffee dissolved with the other solids. It is quicker and more predictable, but instant coffee has already been hot-extracted and you can tell: more roasted, less aroma.
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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Answers to your questions
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