Fresh milk ice cream
Raw milk and little else: it tastes of freshly drawn milk, clean and with nothing masking it. The simplest one we make and one of the hardest.
Above 80 °C milk starts tasting cooked: it is a reaction of its own proteins. In any other ice cream it does not matter, because some flavour covers it. Here the flavour is the milk, so it cannot be allowed.
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
- ·Pasteurised at 75 °C for 15 seconds, not 85. And down to 4 °C immediately.
- ·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
Light and clean, with nothing to distract: milk, a little cream and just enough sugar to leave it silky. It is the recipe where good milk shows, because there is no flavour behind it to hide anything.
All about this fresh milk ice cream
No single ingredient steps forward: it is almost all raw milk, with a little cream and not much else. That is why everything else is measured so as not to get in the way. The fat is kept deliberately low, and the solids reach where they need to with very little milk powder.
The sweetness is among the most restrained, and the weight is carried by the 38 DE glucose, which gives body while barely sweetening. With the sucrose and dextrose it carries, the serving temperature stays in band: creamy, without overdoing it.
What really changes is the pasteurising. Instead of the usual 85 °C it goes to 75 °C held for 15 seconds, the short standard that has always existed. It is enough for safety and it does not cook the flavour. And since we are starting from raw milk here, this step has to be done properly, no shortcuts.
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
Frequently asked questions
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