White asparagus ice cream
A savoury ice cream, as a starter: white asparagus tips and olive oil, soft and vegetal. For a plate, not for pudding.
Its sweetness sits well below that of a normal ice cream. It is not that it is bland: an asparagus ice cream as sweet as a vanilla one would be inedible.
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 asparagus tips, blended first and cold, before anything else goes in.
- ·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
Silky and unctuous, without a cream ice cream's heaviness: nearly all the body comes from the asparagus purée and the fat from the oil. It stays fine in the mouth and the vegetal flavour holds to the end, more savoury than sweet.
All about this white asparagus ice cream
Here the asparagus does not accompany, it is the ice cream: the asparagus tips, blended on their own at the start so no fibres remain. Everything else is built on top.
There is no milk. The fat comes from the olive oil and the cream, and the solids from the milk powder. The oil is not there on a whim: it brings fat and richness without adding a dairy flavour that would cover the asparagus. With that the ice cream sits mid-band on fat and solids.
The sugar is calculated low — dextrose, 38 DE glucose and very little sucrose — and it carries three times the usual salt. Between the two, the result does not taste like a dessert: it tastes of asparagus.
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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