Chocolate Month, Week 3 - David Lebovitz's Chocolate Ice Cream (Philadelphia Style)
Frozen chocolate fudge?
I suppose it’s fitting that I made a Philadelphia-style ice cream this week, as I’m off to Philadelphia on Thursday for a weekend meetup with a group of friends I’ve known since childhood. Our plans for the weekend include seeing the Sixers-Nets game on Saturday night, which will likely feature a match-up that is far more competitive than most people would have predicted back in October when the season got underway with the Celtics obliterating my Knickerbockers.1
But you didn’t come here to read about basketball. You came for the ice cream. And so in the spirit of Brotherly Love, let’s talk about my ice cream brother David Lebovitz for a moment. He has been—and remains—a true inspiration to me as an amateur ice cream maker. But after three of his recipes have failed spectacularly here on the blog, and as I’ve grown more enamored with the stabilizer approach of Salt & Straw and Wanderlust, some of that early shine has worn off. I’m willing to concede that all three failures were due to some amount of user error on my part, but a measure of doubt / skepticism has now crept in whenever I consider one of his recipes. I’m hoping this week’s recipe—which comes from The Perfect Scoop—gets things back on track.
Lebovitz has like 6 different chocolate recipes in The Perfect Scoop. This is his Philadelphia style recipe (i.e. no stablizers added), so it’s a 2 to 1 ratio of cream to milk.
The first thing I had to do was chop the baking chocolate. Using a serrated knife makes this much, much easier, but chopping chocolate still requires considerable effort—in other words, more effort than I normally care to put in when making ice cream.
Once the chocolate was chopped, the rest of the recipe was fairly easy: you just slowly combine all of the ingredients in a saucepan and then blend it at the end using an immersion blender.
You begin by placing the cocoa powder, sugar, and salt in a saucepan, and then slowly incorporate the heavy cream over low heat while whisking.
Once the mixture is smooth, you slowly add in the chopped chocolate, continuing to whisk so that it incorporates fully and evenly.
I will note again here that adding the cream and chopped chocolate slowly—and in small amounts—while whisking ensures a smooth texture. With this approach, I hope I’ve solved the problem of grainy texture once and for all.
At this point, all that was left to do was add the milk and vanilla extract and then blend the whole shebang with the immersion blender. But me being me, I decided to add a bit of guar gum and corn syrup. Because I thought, “Why not? It’ll provide a more scoopable texture.”
I should emphasize that Lebovitz does not call for either guar gum or corn syrup in his recipe. And these additions, I’m afraid, may have been critical errors on my part, as I’ll get to in just a moment.
I let it chill in the fridge overnight before churning the next morning.
Before I started churning, I noticed that the mixture looked incredibly dense. Almost too thick. But there was no way out but through, so I churned it.
And now onto the results.
Based on the photos, you would think this was outstanding. But you would be wrong, my friends. You would be wrong.
Let me first say that the entire family sampled some at dinner tonight, and the consensus was that it was okay; it has a very intense and indeed delicious chocolate flavor. My son thought it tasted great, I thought it tasted good, and my wife and daughter seemed to think it was decent. And hey, the texture was smooth, not grainy, so it was decidely not a spectacular failure in the way some earlier Lebovitz efforts on the blog were.
But the overall texture was not good. Way too dense for ice cream. While we were eating it at the table, I kept telling the fam that it was like frozen fudge or a frozen flourless chocolate cake. My family added that it was also kinda gooey, like cake batter (not in a good way), which I assume was caused by the inclusion of guar gum and corn syrup. The addition of uncalled for stabilizers clearly made an impact, but the chocolate proportion in this recipe is, I think it’s safe to say, waaaaaay too high. With maybe 2oz of chocolate—instead of 6oz—and a little less cocoa powder, this recipe might have succeeded.
But at this point, I think I’ve devoted enough words to my Lebovitz anguish. So as a parting thought, I’ll say that while Lebovitz has a ton of good recipes in The Perfect Scoop (his custard based recipes have always worked out wonderfully for me) some of them are misfires. Nobody’s perfect I guess.2 And moving forward, I promise: no more handwringing over DL!
If I were to goldilocks the past three weeks, I’d say that Clark’s recipe had almost enough chocolate, Lebovitz’s had far too much chocolate, and Jeni’s was just right. Jeni’s is the clear winner of the past three weeks. Next week, I’m thinking chocolate sorbet. And if the internet has any say, we might be back with David sooner that any of us could have predicted!3
I’m appreciating the Knicks this season, as they are a fun team to watch play—especially Jalen Brunson, who is endlessly fascinating to watch on the offensive end of the court. And their relative success has made me temporarily forget how awful James Dolan truly is.
But unless the return of Mitchell Robinson presages some kind of defensive reboot, and unless Thibs radically changes his coaching philosophy and plays the starters way fewer minutes, there’s no way they are beating Boston or Cleveland in a seven-game series, or staying healthy enough to even get that far.
See what I did there?
I said no more handwringing over Lebovitz. Didn’t say he was gonna disappear altogether.