This is my first homemade ice cream with the Cuisinart Ice 21. I used the coffee ice cream recipe from “Hello My Name Is Ice Cream” and poured in some chocolate melted with coconut oil when it was almost completely churned. For the most part I’m pretty pleased with it! There were only a couple of things that weren’t exactly what I was expecting.
1.) The texture was very… rich I guess? I don’t totally know how to describe it. It was kinda too custardy, which makes me think I used too many egg yolks. The book said 100 grams or about 5 egg yolks, but I weighed them out to exactly 100 grams and ended up using 7 egg yolks. Should I stick with 5 next time?
2.) The coffee flavor was not nearly as strong as I had hoped. I infused the custard with coffee beans for 18 hours but the coffee flavor was very mild. Should I use coarsely ground beans? Shots of espresso?
3.) The chocolate was not dispersed super evenly. There were parts of the finished ice cream that got way more chocolate than others. Do I need to add it in earlier? Should I freeze the chocolate/coconut oil and then chop it into smaller chunks instead?
Any and all advice is appreciated!! I’m really excited about making ice cream lol.
by hotlizardtango
6 Comments
Nice post and great job on successfully making your first ice cream!
So the rich/dense/potentially greasy feeling is caused by too much fat.
Personally, I would massively reduce the amount of fat you are putting in the ice cream either through using less eggs or less cream. You could also add extra milk.
I don’t like coffee but I imagine it would need to be bloomed like cocoa. I will let someone else help with that.
For the third point, if you are mixing chocolate in, I like to drip it in with the machine still churning to try to get an even spread. Sometimes I just pour it all over the top once in the tubs however.
Try ground beans or make a 24 hour 4x concentrated cold brew with a drip grind with water. Thats what I do commercially and what my experiments have shown give us the best flavor. Add a little milk powder to offset the water if you want. The water will also offset the fat but if you have too much fat it could be fine.
Does your ice cream have a greasy texture? It looks like it broke or something is off with emulsification. It should be rich and creamy but not greasy.
> I infused the custard with coffee beans for 18 hours
Heck of a first recipe!
I think you’ll fit in just fine here.
Definitely don’t add the chocolate earlier. The ice cream should be only a couple minutes from being done. The key is to drizzle in a slow stream so that it freezes in long delicate threads against the frozen ice cream. Then the dasher will break those up into smaller lengths.
Hello, the rich taste is normal with the recipe from your book. They are made to be right on the edge of having too much fat. Adding the coconut oil probably pushed it over the edge and changed the texture profile quite a bit. Next time, just use straight chocolate.
By adding the chocolate, you did what is called a stracciatella. Normally, it results in a lot of very small pieces. What you want is to temper the chocolate, which means bringing it to a certain temperature to make it crispy, and then pour it into the pot while the ice cream is still hot. If it is too cold, it will crystallize into bigger, less evenly distributed chunks. Dark chocolate is recommended to counterbalance the sweetness of the ice cream.
As for the taste, Dana Cree explains in the book that this technique is an evolution of two different ways of making coffee ice cream. The first is by using extract, which gives a strong espresso taste. The second method uses an infusion of coffee beans in the hot cream mix, which gives a more delicate flavor profile. What you did is the third method. It is less of a coffee ice cream and more of a cold brew, which tastes noticeably fruitier and less bitter than the traditional way. While it tastes good, it can seem different from what most people expect when they think of coffee. That is why she adds crème fraîche, to bring some of that bitterness back.
If you want the same taste but stronger, you can use ground coffee instead of beans and then filter it out. You can infuse it hot or cold depending on your preference. If you want a strong espresso-like flavor, just use extract. That is what I do. Even if the ice cream tastes a bit cheaper, it is still much better than most ice cream, and the time saved is significant.
As a bonus, if you want a brown color for the ice cream, you can add a bit of cocoa powder. The flavor is nearly the same, but it helps enhance the coffee taste and gives the ice cream a beautiful color.
Hope this helps. Your ice cream looks really good 😉
One option you could try is a Philadelphia base which doesn’t use eggs. There’s a good recipe for it in the same book you used.
Whenever I add melted chocolate the way you did I use a spoon to drizzle it in right as the ice cream is finished churning. That will give you smaller flakes and a better distribution. Since the chocolate will freeze as soon as it hits the ice cream you will want to add it more slowly.