Irish coffee ice cream
Coffee and whisky in the same ice cream: toasted bitterness underneath and the spirit showing warm at the finish. A dessert for a long table.
The 40 % whiskey it carries leaves very little pure alcohol in the ice cream. It sounds like nothing, but it is enough to show in the texture: which is why the formula stays exactly where it should and goes no lower.
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
- ·Instant coffee cold, with the powders. Whiskey at the end, after ageing.
- ·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 mild, quick to melt: it carries little added sugar and the whisky softens the mix further, so it goes fast in the mouth. The coffee's bitterness runs underneath and the spirit shows at the finish.
All about this Irish coffee ice cream
The coffee is instant, and it goes in cold with the milk powder, the dextrose, the inulin and the fructose. Instant has one advantage that is decisive here: it gives all the flavour without adding water. A brewed coffee would force you to recalculate the whole recipe to account for the liquid.
The base is a classic ice cream one — milk and cream — and lands right at mid-band, on both fat and solids. The sugar comes from the sucrose, and the inulin adds dry extract without sweetening or softening.
The whiskey comes last. It goes in with the base already aged and is blended just enough. There is very little of it because alcohol does not freeze: any more and the ice cream would stop setting.
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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