Frozen yoghurt
Plain whole-milk yoghurt: tangy, light and very clean. The ice cream that asks for fruit beside it and needs nothing else.
In the culture version the sugars go in at the end, after the 12-15 h of fermentation. Added earlier, the bacteria would eat them and the ice cream would come out sharper and less sweet than calculated.
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 yoghurt goes in on the way down, as it passes 40 °C. Never while heating.
- ·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, with the yoghurt's tang well forward, because it is half a kilo per litre and there is almost no milk to soften it. The cream rounds the edges, but the acidity leads from start to finish.
All about this yoghurt ice cream
Yoghurt cannot take heat: above 40 °C the protein splits and the cultures die. That is why, in the version with yoghurts, the whole yoghurt is not pasteurised: it goes in once the mix has been up to 85 and is coming back down, right as it passes 40 °C.
The version with cultures turns the process around: you pasteurise a base of water, cream and milk powder, bring it down to 40, inoculate the cultures and leave it 12 to 15 h in a yoghurt maker or water bath, until it reaches the acidity you like. And only then do the sugars go in, because sugar added earlier is food for the bacteria.
It comes out lighter and cheaper, but also weaker on solids than the other. It is a fresher, less rich ice cream, and the sheet will flag that it falls below the band for a custard ice cream.
The cultures version came out of a visit to Yon Gallardo's gelateria: he explained that the key is to ferment the whole mix except the sugars, because that is where the good acidity comes from.
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
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