Vanilla and cocoa ice cream
Vanilla pods ground with the sugar and a touch of cocoa powder added on the way down. A water base, with cream and butter: cleaner than a chocolate.
Cocoa powder and not couverture: with no cocoa butter or sugar in the way, the cocoa flavour arrives drier and more bitter, leaving room for the vanilla instead of covering it.
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 pods ground with the sucrose; the cocoa, on the way down, at 50 °C.
- ·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, with two fats working at once: the cream rounds off and the butter gives the firm body the cocoa demands. On a water base the chocolate reads clean and the vanilla sits underneath, holding it up.
All about this vanilla and cocoa ice cream
This is not a chocolate with vanilla: it is a vanilla ice cream over a cocoa base note. That is why the vanilla is ground with the recipe's sucrose and the cocoa goes in in small quantity, just enough for colour and bitterness without swallowing the aroma.
The base is water, not milk, with cream and unsalted butter going in cold, from the start. Between them they supply all the fat.
The cocoa powder is stirred in at 50 °C on the way down and worked in with the blender. After ageing, the mix is strained to remove the bits of pod skin.
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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