Cream and walnut ice cream
The house cream ice cream, milky and clean, with caramelised walnuts on top that crunch when you bite.
The walnuts go in as it leaves the machine and are not part of the calculation. That is why the sheet shows you the figures for the plain cream base: it is the only thing that needs balancing.
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
- ·Break the walnuts up before rippling: whole, they set like stones at −18 °C.
- ·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
Very creamy: nearly three hundred grams of cream per litre, which is what it takes for the cream to be the flavour and not just the texture. The walnut brings the bitterness and the crunch that cut through all that fat.
Everything about this cream and walnut ice cream
This is, point for point, the house cream ice cream. Nothing in the base changes, and rightly so: start tinkering with the formula to make room for an inclusion that doesn't even dissolve and you end up with a worse ice cream.
The caramelised walnuts go in with the ice cream already churned, just like stracciatella or pieces of turrón. They add neither water nor sugar to the mix, so the solids, the sweetness and the serving temperature are exactly those of the cream base.
Both versions of the cream base are here, in case you want more or less dairy under the walnut: the fattier one, more unctuous, and the lighter one, a touch sweeter.
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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