Rum and raisin ice cream
Aged rum and raisins: sweet, boozy and with the raisins soft inside. A gelateria classic that never misses.
Here the raisins are cooked in the rum until the alcohol evaporates and it thickens, whereas in the Málaga-raisin ice cream they are macerated cold. Two different techniques for the same fruit.
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 rum, after ageing. The raisins, cooked in rum and on top at serving.
- ·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 soft, because the rum lowers the freezing point and will not let it firm up. The raisins stay tender inside, already rehydrated, and the rum shows more on the nose than on the tongue.
All about this rum and raisin ice cream
The rum goes in in small quantity and the serving temperature still leaves the usual band: an aged rum is around 40 proof-degrees, so it pulls far harder than a wine. It goes in after ageing, so the alcohol does not evaporate.
The base runs on milk and cream, mid-band on fat and solids. The sugar is almost all sucrose and the sweetness still stays restrained, because rum brings a sensation of warmth but no sweetness.
The raisins go separately and cooked: sultanas in a pan with rum over medium heat until the alcohol evaporates and it thickens. They are served on top, never inside the mix.
Alcoholic ice creams are among the hardest to balance, and on this one we had the help of Yon Gallardo Bracone to finish tuning the parameters.
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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