Octopus ice cream
The strangest ice cream in the house, and that is meant seriously: savoury and marine, rich from the olive oil and without a single strand of fibre. It is eaten as a cold appetiser, not as a dessert.
Nothing is thrown away: all the liquid is the octopus cooking water. Half the flavour is in there, and using it instead of clean water is what makes this taste of octopus rather than of cold mayonnaise.
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 octopus, right after 40 °C, then blend thoroughly. The cooking water, saved from the very start.
- ·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
Unctuous and silky, with no fibre at all: the octopus is blended and strained, so only its flavour is left. The oil supplies the fat and salt outranks sugar, so it lands as a cold appetiser rather than a dessert.
All about this octopus ice cream
This is a genuinely savoury ice cream: plenty of salt and the lowest sweetness on the whole site. At the sweetness of an ordinary ice cream nobody could eat it; at this one, it works as a cold starter.
The fat does not come from milk but from the olive oil, and the solids from the milk powder. In goes cooked octopus and, above all, its cooking water, which carries the concentrated flavour.
The timing: the octopus goes in on the way up, right after the solids are worked in at 40 °C, and is blended thoroughly. Cooked and blended at that point, it dissolves completely and leaves no trace of fibre.
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.