Strawberries and cream ice cream
Strawberries and cream: the classic dessert, tart fruit cutting the fat. A real pink, not a colouring pink.
Vacuum drives the sugar into the strawberry in hours rather than days, without the fruit oxidising. You get a purée of intense colour, very different from simply blended strawberries.
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 strawberries, split: 1/3 on the heat from cold and the rest frozen, off the heat.
- ·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 deeply fruity at once: half the mix is strawberry, and keeping all that water from crystallising needs exactly the cream it carries. The result is dense, the fruit's acidity rounded by the fat.
All about this strawberries and cream ice cream
All the strawberry's sugar comes from the advance prep: strawberries halved with sucrose under vacuum, 24 h in the fridge, blended and frozen. No further sucrose goes into the mix: the remaining sugars are the dextrose and, in the light version, the 38 DE glucose.
The fruit goes in split in two: one third heats from cold with the milk and the cream, and the rest goes in frozen the moment it comes off the heat, which drops the temperature sharply and preserves the raw strawberry flavour.
There are two versions: the fattier one, loaded with cream, where the cream leads; and the lighter one, with 38 DE glucose to recover body, where the strawberry leads.
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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