Guinness and chocolate ice cream
Guinness, dark chocolate and a touch of coffee: bitter, roasted and very dark. Nothing cloying.
The beer goes into the freezer before use and that helps bring the mix down: ice-cold beer poured onto a mix at 30 °C does half the cooling for you.
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
- ·Coffee cold · chocolate at 70 °C · beer ice cold, at around 30 °C.
- ·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 but distinctly soft: the stout's alcohol keeps it from firming up and it is served almost as a spoon dessert. The beer's roast tangles with the cocoa and the coffee, and the bitterness stays to the finish.
All about this Guinness and chocolate ice cream
This is an ice cream built around the beer: Guinness, plus 70 % couverture and instant coffee that underlines the malt's roast. The milk and cream run short, because the chocolate supplies the fat.
The PAC drops below the usual band, and that is unavoidable with that much beer. Which is why Sergio offers a trick of his own for this one: scrape the walls of the machine now and then with a silicone spatula while it churns, so it sets better.
There are three moments and they are staggered: the coffee cold with the powders, the chocolate at 70 °C emulsified with the blender, and the beer at around 30 °C, near the end of the cooling.
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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