Dulce de leche ice cream
Milky caramel, dense and very easy to love. Proper gelateria dulce de leche, with that toasted edge sugar alone cannot give.
The dulce de leche supplies nearly all the sugar in the ice cream. That is why the recipe has neither sucrose nor dextrose: just a little 21 DE glucose for body.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
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Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·The dulce de leche goes in with the pan already off the heat, at 85 °C, as the mix cools.
- ·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 dense, almost chewy: the low-sweetness glucose gives body without raising the sugar, and the dulce de leche already arrives loaded with solids. The caramel's roast dominates and the salt cuts the richness.
All about this dulce de leche ice cream
Here the star arrives ready-made, and that forces you to build everything else around it. The gelato-grade dulce de leche brings almost all the sugar in the ice cream and part of the fat, so the recipe adds barely any sugar: only a little 21 DE glucose, which supplies solids and chew with hardly any sweetening.
The base carries no milk either: water, cream and milk powder. With that the lactose comes down to half what a cream ice cream carries, which is what you must do when the flavour already arrives loaded with cooked dairy.
And it needs saying plainly: this ice cream comes out harder than the rest. Its serving temperature sits well above that of an ordinary ice cream. The sugars in dulce de leche sweeten hard but do little as antifreeze.
Which dulce de leche
This recipe is made with Casa Baltar's gelato-grade dulce de leche, which is not the spreadable one: it has less water and more solids, and that is why it stands up to churning without softening the mixture. 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 — which makes it with its own milk and without altering its composition. Until we spoke with them, the gelato format only existed for professional workshops, in tubs impossible for a home; they were kind enough to pack it in 1 kg so it could be made at home. And if you also want to ripple it, the gelato one will not 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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