Mint chocolate chip ice cream
Real fresh mint and chocolate: cold in the mouth and bitter underneath. None of the usual artificial green.
Mint ice cream does not have to be green. That swimming-pool green is colouring. Infused leaf tints very little, so a pale cream colour is the norm. What does have to be intense is the smell.
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 mint leaves do not count in the calculations: they are strained out before churning, so they contribute neither solids nor sugar.
- ·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
It is built on our vanilla ice cream base, so the texture is the same: creamy and silky, with the fat on target and the solids within band. The chocolate goes in broken up at the end of churning and stays as little pieces that snap when cold, rather than melting into the mix.
All about this mint and chocolate ice cream
The mint is infused in the cream, never boiled with the whole mixture: boil it with the mix and it loses its fresh edge and leaves a grassy base note. Below are three ways to infuse it; choose by the time you have, not by the result, because all three work. And the stabiliser is the one the recipe states: do not touch it even if you change the chocolate.
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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