Mascarpone and vanilla ice cream
Mascarpone and vanilla pod: rich, silky and not remotely cloying. The most elegant ice cream we make.
Grinding the whole pod with the sugar also uses the skin, not just the seeds inside: much of the aroma is there. The sugar acts as an abrasive in the processor and then carries the perfume into the mix.
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 pods ground with the sucrose; the mascarpone, on the way down, at 40 °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
Very creamy and milky, with the mascarpone up front and no cream to mask it. The texture lands close to whipped cream and the vanilla stays underneath, a soft base note that does not compete with the cheese.
All about this mascarpone and vanilla ice cream
Mascarpone is a cream cheese in the literal sense: nearly half its weight is fat and it brings very little protein. With the amount used here, the ice cream comes out high in fat without a drop of liquid cream.
The vanilla is not an extract: the two whole pods are ground with the recipe's sucrose in a processor, and it is that aromatised sugar that then goes into the mix. That is why the sweetness rises to the highest of the dairy custards on the site.
The bits of pod the processor cannot pulverise are caught in the strainer after ageing, not before: over those 12 to 24 h they keep giving up aroma.
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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