Gianduja ice cream
Hazelnut and dark chocolate, the Piedmont pairing: toasted, rich and very long on the palate. One that never tires.
Gianduja was born in Turin out of necessity: the Napoleonic blockade drove up cocoa prices and chocolatiers stretched it with Piedmont hazelnut. Out of that came one of pastry's finest pairings.
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
- ·Cocoa at 40 °C · hazelnut paste at 85 °C off the heat · couverture at 70 °C on the way down.
- ·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 slow-melting, with the hazelnut's and the chocolate's fat doing all the work: there is no cream and none is needed. The nut's roast comes first, the cocoa follows, and the salt sharpens the whole.
All about this gianduja ice cream
The chocolate comes in by two routes: cocoa powder and 70 % couverture. It is not redundant. Cocoa powder brings colour and bitterness with very little fat; the couverture brings cocoa butter, which is what gives the long melt on the palate. And the hazelnut goes in as home-made paste.
There is no cream: the fat comes from the hazelnut, the couverture and the whole milk, and the ice cream stays in band on fat and solids, with the sweetness and the serving temperature where they should be.
Each ingredient goes in where it belongs: the cocoa at 40 °C with the rest of the solids, the hazelnut paste as it comes off the heat at 85 °C and the couverture at 70 °C, on the way down, so it melts and emulsifies with the blender.
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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