Gluten-free Maria biscuit ice cream
Gluten-free Marie biscuit dunked in milk, turned into ice cream. The flavour of the usual afternoon snack, creamy and without chunks, and suitable for anyone who cannot have wheat.
The biscuit is almost all dry matter — flour and sugar — so on its own it brings plenty of solids. Even so there is a little milk powder: without it the ice cream fell short on protein, which is what holds the air in while churning and what stops it melting too soon.
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 biscuits go in when the mix drops below 40 °C, then blend until they are worked in.
- ·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 dense, just like the gluten version: the gluten-free biscuit dissolves the same way and leaves the same body. The flavour is unchanged, mild and dairy-led, with no hint of the different flour.
All about this gluten-free Marie biscuit ice cream
It is the simplest idea there is: a biscuit dunked in milk. And the formula respects that — whole milk, cream and gluten-free María biscuit — with a pinch of milk powder so the protein reaches where it needs to.
The result is an ice cream very heavily loaded with solids and a touch light on fat, with the serving temperature at the very top of the band: it is an ice cream that comes out firm, one to take out of the freezer a while before.
The biscuit is added on the way down, below 40 °C, and blended until worked in. No pieces remain: what you are after is the flavour spread through, like when the biscuit has been sitting in the glass a while.
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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