Indulgent: Milk Chocolate Ice Cream
[Note: You may be noticing that this is, in fact, not my chocolate ice cream. This is a really good approximation of my chocolate ice cream, but I do not have a photo of my own chocolate ice cream--yet--for the following reasons: 1) my food photography situation is super lame. I have almost no space to work with in the kitchen (or anywhere) and I also have crappy lighting--I'm working on this; and 2) my husband snarfed down all of the ice cream before I could get a photo. But it looks like my chocolate ice cream.]
Inspired by the publication of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams At Home, a book written by a woman that I can say with authority is the ice cream goddess of the universe, I have been working on my own ice cream recipes. Partially because . . . well . . . Jeni’s at-home recipes don’t work so well for me all the time. It’s the inclusion of cream cheese into everything–it makes everything taste like cheesecake to me. I can’t make a peach ice cream with her base without it being peach cheesecake. I have also noticed that her at-home recipes don’t freeze quite as well as I want them to, and yes, I did follow the directions (for once)–to the letter. At first. I swear. I made several batches and came to a few conclusions: 1) the cream cheese is very helpful, but the flavor is way too dense; 2) the corn syrup is making the ice cream freeze way too soft; 3) the boiling step is weird and unnecessary because it causes the proteins that help the ice cream texture to coagulate and stick to the bottom of my pot–plus, I can add a wee bit more starch to bind up those water molecules instead of boiling them out.
I was also a little baffled by most of her chocolate ice creams. I had success with the Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World, but the milk chocolates turned out runny and not-that-appetizing. I don’t like using chopped-up chocolate in my ice cream for the same reason that Alton Brown suggested against it in “Churn Baby Churn, II“–that is, that once you take the sugar, extracts, and salt out of a chocolate bar, all you have left is cocoa powder and cocoa butter, and cocoa butter doesn’t freeze so deliciously. I especially can dig this because I hate chocolate chips in ice cream. I know, I’m a freak, but I hate the waxy texture of the chips and how they get stuck in my teeth because they’re too cold to melt on contact with my mouth. I really wanted to make a good “everyday” home-version of chocolate ice cream, so I set about doing so in my Cuisinart 2qt. capacity machine.
And I basically nailed it the first time.*
*(First time meaning, after I had made half a dozen failed batches of non-chocolate flavors to test out various factors of the base.)
Recipe after the jump.
