Malaga raisin ice cream
Raisins and sweet Málaga wine: sweet, toasted and with the alcoholic edge of muscatel. A long-standing classic.
The raisins do not go into the ice cream: they are a topping. Inside, the cold hardens them into little stones; scattered at serving, they eat soft.
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 wine, after ageing. The raisins, soaked 24 h cold and scattered on top when serving.
- ·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 soft, because the Málaga wine will not let the mix firm up. The raisins stay tender inside, soaked, and the wine's sweetness spreads through the whole ice cream rather than concentrating in them.
All about this rum-and-raisin-style Málaga ice cream
The wine is a sweet Málaga of 12 to 16 degrees, and it goes in after ageing. At that quantity the serving temperature drops well below band: this is an ice cream that comes out soft.
The base is classic — milk and cream — mid-band on fat and solids, and the sweetness stays restrained: the wine already brings plenty of its own.
Separately, the raisins macerate in that same wine in an airtight jar, at least 24 h in the fridge. It is a cold maceration, no heat: the raisins swell and keep the wine inside them.
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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