Dulce de leche and beer ice cream
Milky caramel and dark beer: the dulce de leche brings the toasted sweetness and the Dunkel cuts it with its malt backdrop. An ice cream for grown-ups.
The beer goes in at the end because of the alcohol: boil it with the base and it evaporates, taking with it the hop bitterness and the toasted malt, which is exactly what you are after.
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
- ·Dulce de leche as you take it off, at 85 °C. Beer at the end, after ageing and before churning.
- ·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 very soft: the alcohol in the beer lowers the freezing point and the ice cream sits almost at spoon consistency. The caramel comes first and the Dunkel's bitterness closes behind it.
Everything about this dulce de leche and beer ice cream
Here the sugar is barely added at all: the dulce de leche supplies it, and it goes in generously. That is why the recipe carries only a little 21 DE glucose as sugar of its own, plus inulin, a fibre that adds solids without sweetening. Between them the ice cream lands on its sweetness and well loaded with solids.
The beer is a toasted-malt Dunkel. It brings water, bitterness and colour, and alcohol too, which lowers the freezing point: with the PAC below normal the ice cream already comes out soft on its own, so it pays not to overdo the dose or swap in a stronger beer without recalculating.
There are two moments and they cannot be swapped. The dulce de leche goes in as you take it off the heat at 85 °C, so it dissolves in the residual heat without cooking further. The beer goes in after the 8 to 24 h of ageing, cold and just before churning, so neither the fizz nor the aroma is lost.
Which dulce de leche
This recipe is made with Casa Baltar's gelato-grade dulce de leche, not the spreadable kind: it has less water and more solids, and that is why it stands up to churning without softening the mix. With a different dulce de leche the numbers on the sheet stop adding up.
Casa Baltar is a Galician farm — it takes its name from the place where it stands, and locally they call it the Dulce de Leche Farm — producing with its own milk and without altering its composition. Until we spoke to them, the gelato-grade format existed only for professional kitchens, in tubs no household could use; they were good enough to pack it in 1 kg so it could be made at home. And if you also want to ripple it, the gelato-grade one won't do: that is what the other two are for.
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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