Sobao pasiego ice cream
Sobao pasiego and butter: tender, deeply buttery and with a toasted edge. Cantabria in a scoop.
A sobao is butter, sugar, egg and flour in nearly equal parts. Put into the mix it supplies all four at once, which is why the recipe cuts the milk powder and the butter.
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 sobaos, below 40 °C, and blend until they are worked in.
- ·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 buttery: the sobao's butter brings that fresh-from-the-oven cake note milk alone could not give. The fructose keeps it soft straight from the freezer and the sponge dissolves without lumps.
All about this sobao pasiego ice cream
The sobao goes in at the end, below 40 °C, and is blended: it dissolves into the mix and leaves no lumps. What you are after is the butter-and-bakery flavour, not the crumb.
The sugars are split in an unusual way here: a lot of dextrose, some sucrose and a pinch of fructose. Fructose sweetens more than sucrose and lowers the freezing point sharply, so it helps keep an ice cream with this much cake in it from setting hard.
The recipe specifies «El macho» sobaos, with no preservatives. It is not brand fussiness: a sobao with preservatives and vegetable fats changes both the flavour and the fat of the formula.
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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