Chocolate Month, Week 2 - Melissa Clark's Chocolate Ice Cream
Another win for the recipe GOAT!
Before getting into this week’s recipe, just a quick update about the Tournament of Ice Cream: the interest and response have far exceeded my expectations. Thus far, we have thirteen families / households interested in judging…meaning the tournament will almost certainly feature 16 different flavors competing for the title! Some of you have already submitted your entries to me—I currently have six different pint flavors entered into the tournament. Those of you who haven’t yet decided, you have until the last week of February to let me know the name of your entry.
It’s gonna be fun!
I had a lot of confidence going into this recipe because as I made clear in one of the very first posts to this blog, Melissa Clark is the best recipe developer in America. This is not an opinion. It’s just facts. There’s no debate to be had. And because of this, in my heart of hearts, I just knew—knew!—that this recipe was going to succeed.
I don’t want to keep you in suspense here, so I’ll just come right out and say it: my confidence was well placed; this week’s batch of ice cream came out great. In Melissa we trust! 🙏 But enough throat-clearing: let’s talk about it!
Her recipe for chocolate ice cream builds on her “master” base recipe by adding cocoa powder (duh!) and chopped chocolate (double duh!) as well as crème fraîche. I find it interesting that this is the third time crème fraîche has made an appearance on the blog (not something I would have predicted a mere six months ago). I can’t say for certain if that’s why it came out so good, but recipes with crème fraîche are now 3 for 3 on the blog.
Since Melissa’s base is a custard recipe, we’re using eggs as the stabilizer—two weeks in a row without guar gum! Her recipe calls for six egg yolks, but I decided to use only four, as the picture above indicates. And in case you are wondering, these are Berkeley Bowl eggs, so they’re safe.
The first step is to make the chocolate sauce. To do so, you slowly combine 3/4 cup of heavy cream with cocoa powder and chopped chocolate over low heat until the whole mixture is silky smooth.
A technique I’ve only recently figured out is that if you incorporate (hot) liquids into powders or solids a little bit at a time, it is less likely to develop clumps. I suspect that some of my past efforts, which yielded a grainy texture of ice cream, were likely due to not taking my time in this way when making the chocolate sauce. By incorporating the heavy cream into the cocoa powder slowly—and then the chopped chocolate slowly into the cocoa-cream sauce—I was able to achieve a very smooth texture in the finished product.
With the chocolate sauce squared away, it was time to make the custard. Since this entire blog is a sort of by-the-seat-of-my-pants endeavor, especially when it comes to camera work, I simply cannot document the egg-tempering process in any detail. Below is what I managed to capture during this custard go-around.
In summary: Eggs and sugar got whisked; milk was heated and some of it added to the eggs while whisking; the tempered eggs were then added back to the pot with the rest of the milk; the whole thing was cooked until it was, as the French say, nappé; then I strained it into a bowl and added the chocolate sauce, crème fraîche, vanilla extract, and salt; lastly, I immersion blended the mix for about 20 second and then briefly chilled the mixing bowl in the sink using a “cold water” bath (translation: I was too lazy to get any ice from the freezer) before sticking it in the fridge for about 12 hours before churning.
I have to say, the mixture looked amazing pre-churn, almost like pudding.
Better yet, I managed to pour it all into the churning well this week without spilling a drop. Progress!
Best of all, I remembered to record a churning video. Here it is:
I already told you the finished product came out great, but if you’ve read this far (anyone?) you deserve more details than that.
First off, the ice cream scooped perfectly right out of the freezer. I usually let the ice cream sit on the counter for about 5 minutes before scooping, but we forgot to have some after dinner. And then all of a sudden it was getting late and I remembered I hadn’t tried any and decided to sample some immediately. Much to my surprise, it scooped up cleanly. It took a bit of effort, but it scooped cleanly all the same (see above).
And as I’ve already mentioned, the taste was excellent—rich, sweet chocolate flavor but not too heavy or chocolate-y—and the texture was smooth and creamy. So overall, a complete success.
Yet I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I think Jeni’s recipe from last week was slightly better. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but last week’s effort was just a hair better than this week. Maybe it’s because last week I used bittersweet chocolate instead of unsweetened baking chocolate? It’s hard to say! What matters is that at the end of the day, this recipe delivered on every level. Which means another success for Melissa Clark!
And with that folks, Week 2 of Chocolate Month is officially in the books. Two more weeks to perfect my chocolate ice cream-making skills. I’ll see you all next week, where David Lebovitz will once again be seeking redemption. Have a great three-day weekend!