Toffee ice cream
Butter toffee: toasted caramel, dense and very sweet, with the closing bitterness of burnt sugar.
The toffee goes in boiling, onto a mix at 80 °C. Let it cool and it thickens like a soft caramel and becomes extremely hard to work in: hot, it dissolves by itself.
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 toffee, boiling, at 80 °C; then it goes up to 85 °C to pasteurise.
- ·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 slightly elastic, in the best sense: the glucose gives it the consistency associated with soft caramel. The cooked sugar brings the toast and the cream softens it so it does not scorch the palate.
All about this toffee ice cream
The toffee is made separately and is half the recipe: dry caramel with the sucrose, hot cream poured over, taken off before it foams, then water, glucose, unsalted butter and a good dose of salt, all brought to the boil.
That toffee brings a lot of fat, and the ice cream ends up high in fat and solids: one of the richest on the site. The sweetness stays restrained — the caramel is already sweet — and the serving temperature sits in the upper part of the band: it comes out firm and needs taking out of the freezer beforehand.
The timing is precise: at 80 °C the boiling toffee is added and then the climb is finished at 85 °C. It is one of the few recipes we have that specifies an intermediate 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.
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Answers to your questions
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