Pumpkin and vanilla ice cream
Pumpkin and vanilla: a vegetable sweetness, not a sugar one. Deep orange, very creamy and far softer than it looks.
Grinding the vanilla pod together with the sucrose is not fussiness: the sugar acts as an abrasive, breaks the pod down and spreads the seeds through the whole mix. It is the home way of making vanilla sugar.
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 pumpkin, cold from the start. The sugar and the pod, ground together before you begin.
- ·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 silky, one of the densest in the collection: nearly all the dairy is cream and milk powder, so there are plenty of solids and little free water. The roasted pumpkin flesh rounds the mouth and behind comes the toasted sweetness with the vanilla.
All about this pumpkin and vanilla ice cream
The squash is half the recipe and it is, above all, water. That is why the base is built the other way round from usual: a lot of cream and barely any milk. The water is already supplied by the squash; what has to be added is fat and solids, hence the milk powder too.
With that the ice cream plants itself mid-band on fat and solids, with the sweetness a little restrained. The sucrose runs below normal, because the squash brings its own sweetness.
There are two versions: the one with squash cooked at low temperature, which is the one above, and the one with carton squash purée, more direct and considerably higher in solids. In that second one the mix is strained before churning.
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.