Pear ice cream
Ripe pear: delicate, aromatic and low in acidity. A quiet ice cream that grows on you.
Pear oxidises the moment you cut it, and that browning does not go away in the cold. So blend it with a squeeze of lemon and use it right away, rather than leaving it waiting in the fridge.
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 pear pulp, with the mix already cold, never before pasteurising.
- ·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
Soft and very fresh, with the cream carrying the fruit's water without ever masking it. Pear is delicate and stays underneath, so you have to look for it: it shows up at the finish, clean and unacidic.
All about this pear ice cream
This one sits halfway: it carries cream and milk powder, but half its weight is pear pulp. That is why the pear is not a base note but front and centre.
There are two versions. The fattier one leans on cream and little milk, and comes out more enveloping. The lighter one drops the cream, raises the milk powder and brings in 38 DE glucose to recover body without fat: looser, with the fruit even cleaner.
The pulp goes in cold, with the mix already at 4 °C, and never sees 85 °C. That is what keeps the flavour of raw pear rather than cooked pear.
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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