The best chocolate ice cream
When I moved to California, I brought 37 boxes with me, including my collection of pint containers. Yes, pint containers, not pint glasses, procured from an online restaurant supply store. What can I say? I love ice cream, like a proper New Englander, and the pint containers were also great packing material.
During the summer when I acquainted myself with my ice cream machine, I stuck mostly to ice creams thickened with egg yolks. I’ve since started taking some baby steps into egg-free ice cream bases, out of curiosity about whether it really makes a difference. Well, the answer is yes: it makes a difference. It’s weird to think of egg yolks as a flavor that muddies the clean iciness of dairy, but that’s basically what it’s doing.
So, how do you thicken ice cream without egg yolks, and without getting too much ice crystal formation? Some recipes use cornstarch and cream cheese, the latter of which basically carries its own emulsifiers like xanthan gum (Jeni’s is an example of this, as is the egg-free vanilla ice cream on TheKitchn). I’ve never found it easy to get the cream cheese to gracefully meld with the rest of the custard base, though — the recipes always make it seems so simple, but you really have to get the cream cheese at warm room temp, and for the liquid you whisk it with to also be similarly warm (and none of this is ever included in the directions!). Furthermore, it is definitely possible to make chocolate sorbet with just water, cocoa, sugar, and chocolate (see David Lebovitz’s peerless recipe), which essentially gets the balance just right for the ingredients to merge into a sugar syrup thickened with chocolate.
It is thus with great joy that I share with you this recipe for eggless chocolate ice cream! What makes this recipe great is that it’s also really easy to make, and extremely unfussy. I think that you could also do some interesting things by infusing the cream/milk mixture — for example, I plan to try steeping the cream with coffee, for a mocha ice cream. Infusing the cream with tea would also be an interesting experiment. Most importantly, though, the texture of this ice cream is wonderful — helped no doubt by the milk chocolate and the condensed milk. It has just the right amount of chew to it, and it’s nicely creamy without being too rich.
Eggless Chocolate Ice Cream
Ingredients
113g / 4 oz dark chocolate (at least 70%), chopped
67g / 2 oz milk chocolate, chopped
485g / 2c whole milk
230g / 1c heavy cream
150g / 3/4c sugar
80g / 1/4c sweetened condensed milk
25g / 3T cocoa (use a nice dark one)
1/4t salt
Directions
1. Place the milk and dark chocolates in a medium heatproof metal or glass bowl. Bring a large skillet of water to a boil. Turn off the heat and set the bowl in the water. Leave the chocolate to melt gently while you prepare the dairy. Give the chocolate a stir every now and then to make sure it melts completely. (For this reason I still like to chop my chocolate pretty finely.)
2. Place the sugar in a medium saucepan and sift the cocoa into it; stir until combined (this helps prevent the cocoa from clumping when you add the liquid). Add the milk, cream, and condensed milk and whisk to combine. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally with a spatula (reserve the whisk for the next step), until smooth. Simmer for 2 minutes, then remove from the heat.
3. Pour a ladleful of the hot dairy mixture into the melted chocolate and whisk until thoroughly combined. The mixture will have the consistency of ganache for the first few ladles. Add another ladleful and repeat whisking until you’ve added about half of the dairy mixture. Add the remaining dairy mixture and whisk to combine. The custard will still be fairly runny — don’t worry! At this point, you can strain the base if you want (although the only thing getting strained out is essentially chocolate bits that didn’t melt). Cover and chill the base overnight in the fridge (or until it gets down to 40F).
4. To churn the ice cream, scrape the base into the bowl of your ice cream maker and churn until it has thickened — it will take a little longer than the typical ice cream, since the base is more liquidy. It should be the consistency of a thick milkshake. Transfer the ice cream to a container(s) and freeze until firm. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with an extra quarter or third cup of ice cream that doesn’t fit into your two pint containers, and you’ll get to sample the ice cream fresh. You can press a square of wax or parchment paper to the surface of your ice cream before freezing it if you want — this is supposed to prevent ice crystals from forming on the surface of the ice cream. If you’re lazy, don’t worry about it. The ice cream will take about 4 hours to harden completely. I found that it melts a little more quickly than the typical ice cream, so when you serve yourself, don’t stand on ceremony!
Variations
To make mocha ice cream or chocolate chai ice cream, steep 2 tablespoons of coffee or chai tea with the dairy and cocoa as you’re heating it. I recommend using a very fine mesh tea strainer to do this, in order to avoid any grit in your ice cream (alternatively you could strain the dairy mixture as you pour it into the chocolate, but that seems harder to me). You could also use any other kind of tea or flavoring to steep with the dairy. The 2 tablespoons is fairly strong, so if you want your ice cream to be more subtle, use less; however, the added flavors do balance out the sweetness of the ice cream very nicely.