Red liquorice ice cream
Red liquorice from the bag, sweet and an impossible red. Corner-shop flavour, unapologetically.
Red liquorice contains no liquorice. It is a flavoured gummy sweet, usually strawberry: from real liquorice it has inherited only the strip shape and the name.
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 liquorice, crushed and added at 40 °C on the way down.
- ·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 springy, with the chewy quality the sweets leave as they melt into the milk. It tastes of artificial strawberry, in the best sense, and the fructose keeps it soft so it eats like the sweet itself.
All about this red liquorice ice cream
Red liquorice is sugar, glucose syrup and flavouring, so the recipe adds no sucrose at all: only dextrose and fructose. It still reaches its sweetness and sits well on solids.
The base is that of a classic ice cream — milk and cream — mid-band on fat and at the usual serving temperature. It is the same skeleton as the black liquorice one; the only thing that changes is the sweet.
And the method is the same too: while the mix cools, the liquorice goes through the processor, and once chopped it is added on reaching 40 °C. At that temperature the gum melts and blends in; cold it stays in strips that later become stones.
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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