Lemon ice cream
Lemon on a dairy base: fresh and sharp but creamy, with the fine bitterness of the peel. Rounder than a sorbet.
Lemon aroma is not in the juice, it is in the peel: in glands in the yellow layer. That is why it is ground with the sugar, which traps it and carries it into the mix. The juice brings the acidity; the peel brings the perfume.
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 sugar ground with the peel, at 40 °C. The juice, cold, with the mix already at 4 °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 and fresh, lemon out in front and not a trace of grittiness. It carries a lot of juice, so the formula adds milk powder to hold that water and stop it crystallising; and the lemon sugar, ground beforehand with the peel, spreads the aroma through the whole base instead of leaving it only in the juice.
All about this lemon ice cream
Two decisions explain almost everything. The first: the lemon sugar, an advance prep of sucrose ground with lemon peel — with none of the white pith, which turns bitter. That aromatised sugar is what goes in at 40 °C with the stabiliser.
The second: the juice goes in cold, with the mix already at 4 °C. It has to, because citric acid curdles milk when hot. And after ageing it is strained, to take out the bits of peel.
There are four versions, combining two axes: sharp or milder, depending on the juice, and fattier or lighter. Fat rounds off the acidity: fatty and sharp is intense but wrapped; light and sharp is the most piercing of the four.
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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