Goat cheese ice cream
Goat's cheese log in quantity, deliberately barely sweet: an ice cream for a cheeseboard, not a cone. With character and a little bite at the finish.
Its sweetness is the lowest on the site after the savoury ones. It is not a miscalculation: a goat's cheese ice cream at the sweetness of a cream one would taste like a factory dessert.
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 log goes in on the way down, as it passes 40 °C. It is not pasteurised with it inside.
- ·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 and unctuous, with all the fat coming from the cheese: no cream needed here. The tangy, faintly wild note of the goat rules over the sweetness, so it works as a dessert or as a starter.
Everything about this goat's cheese ice cream
Five ingredients and little else: milk, the sugars, the stabiliser and goat's cheese log. There is no cream because none is needed: the cheese already supplies the fat and the ice cream lands at the top of the band, among the fattiest in the house, and well stocked with solids.
The striking part is the sugar split: almost all dextrose and very little sucrose. Dextrose sweetens considerably less than table sugar but freezes far less readily, so it lowers the freezing point twice as much per gram. That is how you get a soft ice cream that doesn't taste sweet.
The cheese goes in on the way down, at around 40 °C, with the stick blender. At that temperature it breaks down well and there is still no risk of the acidity splitting it.
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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