Sweet peanut ice cream
The Helados Romero recipe: roasted peanut paste, with no added sugar. Rich, savoury underneath and one of the most intense we have.
Its solids run outside the band for a custard ice cream. It is another gelatiere's recipe and it is built that way on purpose: dense, almost spreadable.
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
- ·Peanut paste and oil, at 60 °C on the way up. The honey, at 40 °C with the stabiliser.
- ·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
Very dense and buttery, with the richness only peanut paste gives: it coats the palate and stretches out the melt. The roast fills the mouth and the nut's own savoury edge cuts the sweetness.
All about this sweet peanut ice cream
The paste is made from unsalted roasted peanuts ground until they release their oil; out of that comes the paste the recipe uses, and the salt is added to it. There is also peanut oil, which reinforces the flavour and the richness.
The sweetness is carried by the sucrose and the orange blossom honey — one of the few sugars outside our usual five — and they leave it above band. With that fat and those solids, it is one of the most substantial ice creams here.
The timing is its own: the paste and the oil go in at 60 °C, mid-climb, before reaching 85. It is the only recipe on the site that specifies that temperature.
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.
Ad links: we link to Amazon. We are not an Amazon affiliate in your market yet, so we earn nothing from these links.
Answers to your questions
Frequently asked questions
Other recipes
you might like
Missing a sugar?
Tick the one you haven't got and which alternatives you do have. We'll tell you whether you can make it with what's there.