Stracciatella ice cream
A cream-heavy base and chocolate shavings: very milky, with the chocolate cracking between your teeth. The Italian classic, unadorned.
The chocolate shavings in the litre are not part of the balance: they go in at the end, with the ice cream already made. The recipe you see calculated is only the cream that carries them.
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 shavings are made from a 70 % bar and kept aside until the ice cream comes out of the churn.
- ·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 full-bodied from the amount of cream, which is exactly what the chocolate needs to set into thin flakes as it falls. Those shavings crack and melt on a clean, milky base.
All about this stracciatella ice cream
Stracciatella lives or dies on contrast: soft custard against hard chocolate. And for that contrast to work, the base has to be rich. This one is: heavily loaded with cream, with the fat and solids above an ordinary cream ice cream.
The reason is physical. At −18 °C chocolate is rock hard, and if the custard around it is hard too, you end up biting your way through the ice cream. With this base the spoon goes in on its own and the shavings snap cleanly in the mouth.
The chocolate is grated, not melted: the fine shaving dissolves instantly and releases the cocoa. Drizzle melted chocolate in and it would freeze into thick sheets that stay whole and cold.
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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Answers to your questions
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