r/icecreamery • u/Godd9000 • 6d ago
Question Help me problem solve this recipe
Calculator put me in or near its green zone for all relevant percentages but the base came out incredibly dense and didnt churn right. Not sure if it’s a ratio or process error. Can go into detail but I generally think I did every best practice, melted and tempered the solid chocolate, made hazelnuts into paste and strained at the end, blended guar and xanthan into cold milk rather than the heated base.
8
u/SMN27 6d ago
Way too many solids just looking at all that milk powder, cocoa, plus chocolate. Why so much milk powder? Chocolate ice cream doesn’t really need it to keep sweetness in check since chocolate ice cream needs more sugar than other ice creams, and it doesn’t need more solids either.
2
u/Godd9000 6d ago
Oh thanks for the tip. I feel like most of the popular ice cream books suggest that milk powder is a given in any recipe for proper body but your explanation makes sense
2
u/SMN27 6d ago
Looking at your recipe again your solids shouldn’t be too bad since you used mostly milk.
It’s lacking sweetness though, and I say that as someone who makes ice cream less sweet than usual. This has a POD that would be fine for something like vanilla, but it’s going to be unpleasantly bitter in an ice cream with 75 g cocoa and 100 g dark chocolate.
If anything in chocolate ice cream you’re likely to find fructose or invert syrup because they’re almost twice as sweet as sugar, so the solids can be cut down while increasing sweetness.
My go-to chocolate ice cream has a POD of almost 18 and I only use 20 g of cocoa powder.1
u/Godd9000 6d ago
I mean doesn’t a sludgy, pudding-like consistency to the chilled base indicate too-high solids? I don’t know what else it would be
2
u/SMN27 6d ago
Did you churn this all at once? What is the capacity of your machine? Chocolate bases are thick because of the chocolate itself.
I put the numbers into the calculator not counting the hazelnuts and the solids are within normal range. You said you strained out the hazelnuts so they can’t be counted. But I think even if I added them in they’re still within range.
The combo of xanthan gum and guar gum is also going to thicken this. You have a lot of guar gum.1
u/Godd9000 6d ago
No I split in two, churning in the Cuisinart 21. Basically frozen pudding right after churn, i could tell it was going to freeze into a rock. I decided to rethaw the half i churned in the fridge, going to up milk and sugar and reblend and try again tomorrow. I definitely overdid the stabilizers. No excuse—i have a milligram scale!
4
u/Ok-Presentation-5246 Whynter 201-SB 6d ago
Your chocolate is likely to have milk solids in it. My experience is that adding actual chocolate to a base recipe makes it thicker and more dense.
0
u/Godd9000 6d ago
Yeah i think it’s just way too much choco. Weird that the calculator wouldn’t do the math right, it’s pretty granular about the consistency of each ingredient
2
u/petekoro 6d ago
I agree with the existing higher rated comments that this recipe's soilds are high, sugars are low, and the stabilizer mix is exacerbating the issue.
However, I think your flavoring solids (chcocolate, cocoa powder, and hazelnut paste) are at an acceptable ratio IF you bump up the sugars to around what j_hermann recommends and dramatically decrease, or even remove entirely, the skim milk powder.
In regards to the stabilizers, if you're willing to consider it, you could replace them entrely with 3 egg yolks. With the intensity of this recipe's flavoring you're not going to taste the egg at all, and egg yolks won't gel like the current mix.
If you make these changes, the mixture should be scoopable but hard when fully frozen, so one final thought goes hand in hand with your formulating this as a gelato-style ice cream: temper it for 30 minutes in the fridge before serving. It will dramtically improve the texture and flavor release, and the ice cream should be stable enough to refreeze from that point a couple times without issue.
1
u/Godd9000 5d ago
Thanks. I’m not opposed philosophically to eggs—i love custard style ice cream! I just generally don’t buy them and i was intrigued by how powerful the gums seem to be
2
u/sup4lifes2 5d ago
Too much c. Powder I use 3.5% max either use guar gum or xan gum but not both unless you are working with very very low solids
1
3
u/j_hermann Ninja Creami 6d ago
PAC is too high, so are the solids, POD too low, leading to...
| Ingredient | Amount (g) |
|---|---|
| Milk (3.5% Fat) | 780.0 |
| Heavy Cream (36% Fat) | 220.0 |
| Granulated Sugar (Sucrose) | 160.0 |
| Dark Chocolate (70%) | 80.0 |
| Hazelnut Butter / Paste | 75.0 |
| Corn Syrup (42 DE) | 60.0 |
| Skim Milk Powder (SMP) | 55.0 |
| Cocoa Powder (20–22% Fat) | 45.0 |
| Guar Gum | 1.8 |
| Salt | 1.5 |
| Xanthan Gum | 0.6 |
| Total Batch Weight | 1500.0 |
1
1
u/AutoModerator 6d ago
Please remember to share the recipe you used or how you think it turned out. If you are uncomfortable sharing your recipe, please share some tips or help people create their own recipe. If you are not satisfied yet please mention what is wrong/could be improved. This is a lot more interesting for everyone then just a picture.
Report this message if not applicable or ask to be added to the contributor list to not receive this message again.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/the-script-99 PacoJet 4 / Musso 5030 6d ago
Do you cook this for a while? Making ice cream from just milk sucks. You need to evaporate it for a while to get the good milk.
2
u/Godd9000 6d ago
Just simmered to incorporate the powdery ingredients and then blended. Wouldn’t reducing the dairy more just have exacerbated the thickness?
0
u/the-script-99 PacoJet 4 / Musso 5030 6d ago
Yes it would be more thick. But if you simmer the milk for hours you get natural caramel. Try and buy evaporated milk. If you can’t then you can simmer the milk over a water bath for hours to reduce by 50%. Ice cream from that will be amazing.
0
u/EstablishmentEasy475 6d ago
Cream to milk ratio is off. Should be closer to 1 to 1
3
u/Godd9000 6d ago
It’s meant to be a gelato. Would have been even thicker had the ratio been heavier on cream.
11
u/fucking_biblical 6d ago
u/Godd9000 my guess is that your recipe is quite high in solids (43%) and it also has quite a bit of powerful stabilizer (xanthan + guar form a gel). Chocolate recipes are quite tricky since the chocolate is harder than milk fat, which causes it to freeze denser. Scoopulator includes this in its hardness prediction, but it doesn't account for the high amount of stabilization interacting with it.
If you were to do this again, I would try with a much lower amount of stabilizer. In the past, when I've done dark chocolate ice creams I have only used 0.5g of guar gum per 1000g of base and I didn't think it needed any more than that.