Mocha ice cream
Dark chocolate and coffee: bitter, roasted and very dark. Mocha as it has always been, with no extra sweetness.
The 70 °C is not a whim: it is the window where the couverture melts completely and emulsifies without effort. Below that it stays lumpy and you end up fighting with the blender.
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
- ·Instant coffee cold, with the powders. Couverture at 70 °C, on the way down.
- ·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 long melt despite carrying little cream: the chocolate's fat covers that job and holds the body. The coffee's bitterness comes in first and the cocoa rounds it off, neither covering the other.
All about this mocha ice cream
A mocha is coffee with chocolate, and here they are measured so that neither buries the other: instant coffee and 70 % couverture. The coffee goes in cold, with the milk powder and the sugars; the couverture, on the way down.
Look at the cream: very little, when the norm in a custard ice cream is a good deal more. The reason is the couverture, which is nearly half cocoa butter and already supplies the missing fat. Even so the ice cream lands right at mid-band on fat and solids.
The sugar is split between dextrose, sucrose and fructose up to the usual sweetness, and the serving temperature stays where it should. With cocoa and coffee, two bitters, the sweetness has to run high so the whole does not turn harsh.
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.
Ad links: we link to Amazon. We are not an Amazon affiliate in your market yet, so we earn nothing from these links.
Answers to your questions
Frequently asked questions
Other recipes
you might like
Missing a sugar?
Tick the one you haven't got and which alternatives you do have. We'll tell you whether you can make it with what's there.