Dulce de leche and banana ice cream
Dulce de leche and banana: milk caramel against ripe fruit. Sweet on sweet, and it works.
The dulce de leche goes in hot on purpose: that way it dissolves by itself. Cold it would form balls that even the blender cannot fully break down, leaving veins of hard caramel.
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 dulce de leche at 85 °C, as it comes off the heat; the banana cold, with the mix at 4 °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
Dense and indulgent, with plenty of cream holding it together. The banana pulp thickens it further and brings its own sugar, so the dulce de leche's caramel and the fruit end up fused into a single mouthful.
All about this dulce de leche and banana ice cream
The dulce de leche goes in straight off the heat, with the mixture still at 85 °C: at that temperature it dissolves effortlessly. The banana, by contrast, waits until the mix is cold.
The base is water and cream, with no whole milk, and leaves the recipe high in fat, the highest on the site among the fruit custards. The sugars lean on 38 DE glucose to give body without raising sweetness, because the dulce de leche already arrives loaded.
Note that the banana here goes in before ageing, the reverse of our banana ice cream, where it comes after. Browning matters less here: the caramel colour hides 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.
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