Roasted chestnut ice cream
Roast chestnut: sweet, floury and with the smoke of the roasting behind it. It tastes of autumn and of a street stall.
The chestnuts have to be peeled fast, straight out of the oven: once they cool, the skin grips the flesh and peeling half a kilo turns into a punishment.
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
- ·Butter cold with the liquids · the chestnut paste at around 45 °C.
- ·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
Dense and slightly floury, in the best sense: the chestnut's starch thickens the mix and gives it the feel of a spooned cream. The butter rounds off what the cream does not cover, and the roast plus the pinch of salt close the mouthful.
All about this roast chestnut ice cream
The chestnuts are roasted whole at 190 °C for 35 to 40 minutes, with a couple of cuts so they do not burst and the domed side facing up. Peel them while hot and chop them as fine as you can.
This is one of the few recipes with butter, and it goes in cold, with the milk and cream, from the start. Between that and the cream, the ice cream sits on its fat target and high on solids, because chestnut is almost all starch.
The sugar splits between fructose, dextrose and very little sucrose: an unusual split that lowers the freezing point without cloying, because chestnut is already sweet and very dry. The paste goes in at around 45 °C.
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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