Popcorn ice cream
Buttered, salted popcorn inside the ice cream: sweet and savoury at once, with the toasted base note of the corn. It tastes like the cinema.
It is the cheapest ice cream in the house. A little popcorn and a little butter give more flavour than ingredients costing ten times as much.
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
- ·Straining is compulsory: without it, the corn hulls come through and ruin the ice cream.
- ·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 and clean, with no chunks: the popcorn is infused and strained out, so it leaves the flavour but not the texture. The butter brings the cinema memory and the salt marks the finish, between sweet and savoury.
All about this popcorn ice cream
Taste a single popcorn kernel and there is little there. What you recognise as the cinema flavour is the combination of butter, salt and toasted corn, which is why this recipe uses butter as well as cream, and pre-salted popcorn.
The popcorn goes through the processor and in with the mix at 4 °C, not into the pan. It infuses cold during the ageing, releases the toasted aroma and then everything is strained: the corn skins do not break down and they wedge between your teeth.
Look at the sugars: they run below the usual, and the ice cream still reaches its sweetness. The trick is fructose, which sweetens almost twice as hard as table sugar: it comes out sweet without cloying, which is exactly what a savoury flavour needs.
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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