For many people, myself included, chocolate is a staple of the cupboard (or fridge).

Native to Central and South America, fruit from cacao trees are used to produce our favourite chocolate treats. In fact, the first historical reference to chocolate was from an ancient tribe called the Olmecs in South Mexico, who would drink it during ceremonies and worship. I’m sure we can all agree that to this day, people still worship chocolate.

Enticing the chocoholics

When it comes to chocolate ice cream there’s a distinct divide in taste. You’ll often find chocoholics repeatedly use the phrase ‘I love chocolate but I don’t like chocolate ice cream’, with their main reason being that they don’t believe it tastes enough like chocolate.

Now the answer to this is relatively simple – to make your chocolate ice cream taste more chocolatey you need to…drum roll…put more chocolate in it (groundbreaking, I know).

Whilst this might seem like a simple solution, putting it into practice is actually more difficult than you may think. To make your ice cream chocolatey enough to entice chocolate lovers, we’re talking around 10% total chocolate to 90% ice cream within your recipe. But having a chocolate content this high alone, is fraught with problems.

The issues

Simply adding more chocolate to your ice cream recipe will significantly increase the amount of solids. This ultimately means a whole host of issues including making it drier, making it hard to scoop, increase its weight (therefore pressing out air in the mix) and making the taste quite bitter. In total, just adding chocolate to an existing base mix will take your total solids to 44-48% which is around 6-10% too high.

In previous articles, we have spoken about scoopability and how adding dextrose is an effective solution, but when it comes to chocolate ice cream this won’t help to combat the dryness or dark bitterness of the added chocolate. The only way to truly sort this issue, is to roll the process right back and create a chocolate recipe from scratch.

The recipe

The ideal chocolate ice cream recipe will require reducing solids in some part of your recipe, as well as reducing fats in other parts.

For example, if I was to make a milk chocolate ice cream, I would want to reduce the amount of cream used and replace that with milk chocolate pieces. I would then use a small amount of cacao powder to give body to the chocolate flavour.

Doing this, however, means I subsequently need to reduce solids from my sugars and milk powders to account for the extra solids from the cacao powder and chocolate pieces. Don’t worry about your ice cream’s scoopability when reducing your sugars, the sugars contained within your milk chocolate pieces will balance this. 

But what happens if you wanted to venture over to the dark side to create a richer, dark chocolate ice cream?

This is where the real problems start to arise. As dark chocolate pieces contain around 60-70% total cacao solids, this means there is much less sugar and therefore you must add more in other areas. As it’s a dark chocolate recipe, you don’t want to overdo it on the sweetness and therefore less sweet sugars, such as the much-loved dextrose, are really important.

The heat

Heat is a crucial element when making chocolate ice cream.

My belief is that, when making a milk chocolate ice cream or gelato, you should only heat your mix to around 65 degrees (for the legal minimum amount of time) and then cool your mix to 4 degrees (fridge temperature).

For dark chocolate recipes, you would ideally heat your mix to 90 degrees to really make sure you are cooking the cacao and getting the most flavour from it. Again, this should then cool to 4 degrees.

Once these are cooled, aging is incredibly important. This provides the chocolate time to oxidise, ensuring that you get true colour and flavour in every scoop.

The texture

Last but certainly not least, once your ice cream or gelato has been batch frozen, you should then consider texture.

Particularly with chocolate recipes, texture can make or break an ice cream. People like biting into chocolate, therefore adding chocolate chips or Stracciatella will not only add texture but also add another element of flavour.

So, if you put my recommendations into practice within your business, the next time chocolate lovers try your ice cream it will truly feel and taste like real chocolate.

See you next time for the latest scoop!

Jonny

The post Gelato Jonny 35 – Choc up your recipe – improving your chocolate ice cream appeared first on Antonelli.