Petit Suisse ice cream
The petit suisse of childhood teatime: mild cheese with strawberry and raspberry, tangy and very light. It tastes of childhood without cloying.
It contains no petit suisse: it contains cream cheese. What reproduces that flavour is not the specific cheese but the combination of mild dairy, red fruit and a sweetness well above the norm.
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
- ·Cream cheese below 40 °C · strawberries and raspberries with the mix already cold.
- ·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
Very creamy and dense, the fresh cheese bringing body and acidity at once. It carries little cream because the cheese already supplies the fat, and that tangy edge is what brings back the childhood dessert.
All about this petit suisse ice cream
It is the sweetest ice cream on the site: the sweetness runs high, with sucrose and dextrose. And it makes sense, because it is loaded with acid: cream cheese plus red fruit, strawberries and raspberries. With less sugar it would taste sour, not like an afternoon treat.
The base is short on milk and cream because the cheese already brings fat: the ice cream sits mid-band on fat and very heavily loaded with solids.
The two main ingredients go in at different points. The cheese, below 40 °C, where it breaks down nicely with the blender. The fruit, with the mix already cold: it is acidic and hot there is a risk it splits the mixture, besides losing its vivid colour.
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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