Honey ice cream
Here honey is not a flavouring, it is the recipe's main sugar. And it shows: floral, dense, with the note only real honey gives.
It has barely any table sugar. The honey does almost all the work, which is why the salt goes up to double the usual: it is needed to stop it cloying.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
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Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·The honey in the mix goes in from the start; the one you actually taste is in the threads on top.
- ·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 somewhat softer than usual, because honey carries a lot of fructose and that fructose stops the mix hardening. The maltodextrin gives back the body the honey's sugar takes away, and the floral aroma survives intact.
All about this honey ice cream
Honey is sugar before it is aroma: fructose and glucose in proportions that sweeten more than sucrose and act as antifreeze far more strongly. Honey supplies most of the sugar in the ice cream, so the recipe cuts the table sugar sharply and brings in 21 DE glucose, the least sweet of them all, which serves to restore solids without adding sweetness.
The salt is no whim either: there is twice as much as in other recipes, and it is there to cut a sweetness that, with this much honey, would turn heavy.
The honey goes in cold, from the start, and pasteurises with everything else. That costs it part of its perfume, and it is deliberate: the fine aroma is added at the end, with a few threads of raw honey on top.
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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