Lemon pie ice cream
Lemon pie turned into ice cream: an egg-yolk custard underneath, juice added cold so it does not split, and on top crunchy streusel and meringue torched to order.
The juice goes in cold and last for a chemical reason: citric acid curdles milk when hot. With the mix already at 4 °C the protein holds and the ice cream stays smooth.
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 yolks at 85 °C, off the heat. The lemon juice, cold.
- ·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 very sharp, with the butter giving that baked-pastry note the pie has. The lemon's acidity cuts through the fat and the streusel stays crunchy on top without going soft.
All about this lemon pie ice cream
It is the most assembled recipe on the site: three preparations. The base, an almond streusel frozen in a ball, grated and baked at 160 °C, and an Italian meringue with syrup at 120 °C.
The base is water and cream, with butter and yolk going in as it comes off the heat, the mixture still at 85 °C: there the yolk sets just enough and provides emulsion. The zest goes in from the start, with the powders.
The lemon juice — which goes in generously — is added with the mix already cold. The final assembly is pure pâtisserie: rippled with streusel, into a long tub, meringue piped on and a blowtorch.
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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