Chocolate ice cream with polyols
Chocolate sweetened with polyols, made with cocoa powder rather than couverture. The cocoa goes in with the stabiliser and is blended in: genuinely bitter and very clean.
There is no couverture here, and that is deliberate: couverture chocolate is nearly half sugar. Cocoa powder gives you the flavour without the sugar in couverture, even if you have to give up the cocoa butter and the way it melts.
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 cocoa powder, at 40 °C with the stabiliser, and blended thoroughly so no lumps remain.
- ·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
Less unctuous than an ordinary chocolate and with a colder attack: polyols cool as they dissolve and do not leave the rich sensation sugar gives. The cocoa stands out sharply, without the sweetness that usually rounds it off.
All about this chocolate ice cream with polyols
It is the cocoa powder that holds this recipe up: it brings flavour and, above all, solids. Thanks to it the ice cream reaches considerably more dry extract than the other two recipes with polyols on the site.
The sweetness comes from mannitol, erythritol and fructose, plus a pinch of aspartame. The fat stays low, supplied by the whole milk powder and the cocoa's own butter.
The cocoa is added at 40 °C, together with the stabiliser, and blended thoroughly: as a powder it tends to clump, and that is the moment when the blender can break it up completely.
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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