Tiramisu ice cream
Mascarpone, egg yolk and Marsala: rich, sweet and with the wine showing. The whole tiramisu, minus the sponge.
Mascarpone is 47 % fat: nearly half its weight. Which is why a small amount means not a drop of cream is needed, and the base can be whole milk and nothing more.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
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Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·The mascarpone, with the mix at 4 °C. The yolk, at 40. Each at its own moment.
- ·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
Dense and velvety from the yolk, which works as in a crème anglaise and rounds off the mascarpone. The coffee is bitter just enough to cut the sweetness and the sponge supplies the base note, without leaving a biscuity texture.
All about this tiramisu ice cream
The mascarpone is added with the mix already cold, never hot: at 85 °C it would split and turn grainy. It supplies almost all the fat, so the recipe carries no cream. The yolk goes in at 40 °C and acts as an emulsifier; any more and the ice cream would start tasting of crème caramel.
The coffee does not go in the mixture. It goes into the sponge fingers layered inside the tub, exactly as in the dessert. Put into the mix, the ice cream would taste of mocha; kept out, each spoonful alternates custard and coffee, which is what a tiramisu is about. And the soak is made as a syrup, not as liquid coffee: the free water in coffee crystallises inside the ice cream and ice needles appear around each piece.
The Marsala wine goes in at the end of churning, almost finished, so it does not evaporate. It is only a few grams but they weigh: Marsala is a powerful antifreeze and it is what places this recipe in the family of liqueur ice creams, which run a colder PAC on purpose.
The sugars split between sucrose, dextrose and 21 DE glucose. Dextrose chills hard and sweetens little, and glucose gives body without sweetness; between them they offset the cold the Marsala already brings and leave the sweetness and the serving temperature where they belong.
The result: the fat on target and the solids in band, a spoonable ice cream that does not clag. The cocoa, sifted through a fine strainer and only at serving.
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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