Slow-cooked apple ice cream
Apple and butter: compote-like, with the fruit's acidity and a toasted base note. It tastes of apple pie without the pastry.
Cooking apple sous-vide is the opposite of roasting it: nothing evaporates and nothing browns, so the result tastes of intensified raw apple, not baked apple. Two techniques, two different ice creams.
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
- ·Apple sous-vide 2 h at 85 °C in the immersion circulator; into the mix once cold.
- ·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 the butter rounding off what the cream does not cover. Cooked at low temperature, the apple keeps its fresh aroma instead of tasting of compote, and that perfume holds to the finish.
All about this low-temperature apple ice cream
The preliminary prep is the recipe: apples peeled and quartered, vacuum-packed with the vanilla pod or the cinnamon, and 2 hours in the water bath at 85 °C. With no air and no evaporation, the fruit cooks in its own juice and keeps its aroma whole.
Out of that comes the apple that goes into the mix. The recipe also uses butter, which together with the cream leaves the ice cream in band on fat and solids, with the sweetness where it belongs.
There are two versions, one richer and one lighter. In both, the apple goes in once the mix has cooled: after so much care beforehand, there would be no sense in cooking it again.
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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