Olive oil ice cream
Extra virgin olive oil: green, slightly peppery and bitter at the finish. It sounds odd and it is addictive.
It contains neither milk nor cream: all the fat is oil. It is the ice cream that best proves dairy fat is not essential for creaminess — it only has to be emulsified properly.
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 oil, cold and from the very start, with the water: it goes through the whole heating run.
- ·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
Silky with a long melt. There is no cream here: the richness comes from the oil itself and the body is held by the milk powder, so it starts light and then fills out. At the finish the oil's bitterness and pepperiness appear, lifted by the pinch of salt.
All about this olive oil ice cream
The base is water with milk powder and the fat comes from extra virgin olive oil: the ice cream plants itself high in fat and on its solids. The oil goes in cold, at the start, and makes the whole heat journey with the mixture.
The sugar is calculated low: the sweetness runs well below that of an ordinary ice cream, with dextrose, 38 DE glucose and very little sucrose. It is the dextrose that holds up the serving temperature without sweetening: that is what lets an ice cream this unsweet stay creamy.
And it carries three times the usual salt. Between the low sweetness, the salt and the oil's bitterness, the result reads as a savoury dish with a sweet undertone, not as a dessert.
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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