White chocolate and vanilla ice cream
White chocolate and whole vanilla pod: sweet, silky and very dairy-led, with the vanilla keeping it from cloying.
White chocolate and vanilla get on because they share an aroma family: white is cocoa butter and milk, with no bitter cocoa to compete with the vanilla.
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
- ·Vanilla at 40 °C · chocolate melted at 50 °C and emulsified at 15 °C · it is strained.
- ·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 creamy and dense, with the slow melt cocoa butter gives. The vanilla shows in the speckling and tempers white chocolate's dairy sweetness, which without it tends to dominate everything.
All about this white chocolate and vanilla ice cream
It is the same base as the white chocolate ice cream — water, milk powder and white couverture in quantity, with barely any added sucrose — with the vanilla built in: the pods go in at 40 °C with the stabiliser.
The ice cream arrives high in fat and on its solids, with sweetness and serving temperature in band.
It is the chocolate handling that sets the recipe: it is melted separately at 50 °C and first emulsified with a small part of the mix at 15 °C. After ageing it is strained, which removes the pods along the way.
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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