Danish butter cookie ice cream
Danish butter biscuit with coconut: crisp, golden and thoroughly buttery. The familiar blue tin.
There is neither milk nor cream: the fat comes from the butter and the milk solids from the milk powder. That way the ice cream tastes of buttery biscuit, which is exactly the point.
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 biscuits, at 40 °C on the way down — and remove the pod before blending.
- ·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 buttery: the fat comes from the biscuit's butter and the body is built by the powdered milk solids, with no cream needed. The coconut sits underneath and the touch of salt shows at the finish.
All about this Danish biscuit ice cream
The Danish butter cookie is essentially flour and butter, little else. For the ice cream to taste of that, the recipe does without milk and cream: water, skimmed milk powder and unsalted butter, which go in at 40 °C, along with the stabiliser and the sucrose.
At that same point in go the half vanilla pod and the desiccated coconut, which infuse while the mixture climbs to 85 °C. The pod is removed before blending; the coconut stays.
The cookies come last, at 40 °C on the way down, and are blended in. With fructose among the sugars, the sweetness rises sharply: it is an unabashedly sweet ice cream, like the cookie it imitates.
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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