Marzipan ice cream
Pure almond, like Christmas marzipan: sweet, dense and very rich. It tastes of December in any month.
Marzipan is made with raw almonds; turrón with toasted ones. That is practically the only difference between them at the outset, and you taste all of it.
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 almond paste, as the cooldown begins, right after taking it off the heat.
- ·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 with a faintly grainy edge, that of ground almond which never entirely disappears. The fructose keeps it soft and the whole thing tastes of freshly made marzipan, sweet without cloying.
All about this marzipan ice cream
The flavour comes from the preliminary prep: raw marcona almond ground until it releases its oil and turns into paste. Out of that comes the paste the recipe uses; the surplus is made deliberately, because some always stays behind in the grinder.
The base is water with milk powder and little cream: the almond already brings fat, and the ice cream ends up in band on fat and solids. The sugar splits between dextrose, sucrose and fructose up to the right sweetness.
The paste is stirred in as the cooling begins, with the mix still hot: it disperses effortlessly that way. Added at the start, the long heating would strip part of its aroma; wait until it cools and it stays in lumps.
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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