Transcription
Should we scoop up? You want to just go for it? Okay.
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I'm Tyler Malek, head ice cream maker for Salt & Straw. I'm going to show you how to make the best chocolate ice cream using the perfect ice cream base.
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There's a few secret ingredients to making the perfect ice cream. This base, it's simple at its core. There's some science behind it. What I'm getting is, I'm targeting a very specific ratio of fat, sugar, and water. And if I hit that perfect ratio, then the ice cream is going to be excellent.
Making this is really simple. I've got a one-to-one ratio of milk and cream. I'm gonna only heat the milk for this because I really don't want to heat that cream. The cream has fat in it, and heating fat just kind of messes everything up. I've got two tablespoons of milk powder, and this milk powder is just going to give us a little bit more complexity to the milk flavor of the ice cream.
I love having two different types of sugar, so cane sugar and an invert sugar in the form of corn syrup, because it's going to give us a really dynamic texture. What many people don't realize is that sugar is our anti-freeze. So, it's the only thing that's going to make this ice cream perfectly scoopable at our really perfect scooping temperature.
And finally, I've got one secret ingredient. I replace all of my eggs with xanthan gum. Now, xanthan gum sounds scary because it starts with an X, but it's not scary at all. In fact, you'll find this in pretty much every grocery store. It's going to give us the same properties of eggs, but it's not going to give us the flavor of egg yolks. We don't need much of this, but I'm going to add a quarter teaspoon. So, a little goes a long way here, but I want to have just enough so that it kind of holds the ice cream together as it lives in the freezer. It's going to just give us a nice longer life on the ice cream and give us a little bit more stability in the overall life cycle of ice cream.
And then I'm gonna add my heavy cream. I never heated my cream. I never messed up the fat in this, so it's gonna be a really nice texture at the end of the day. And now I can take this, I can cool it and use it immediately, or for an even better ice cream, if I let this sit in my fridge for 12 hours, all the kind of sugar and proteins and fat kind of meld together, and the ice cream is gonna be a lot better.
You'll notice there's no eggs in this ice cream, and that's very, very purposeful for me. Eggs are great when you want egg flavor. What I do is, I'll start with a really, really clean base: milk, cream, sugar. Replace the eggs with xanthan. And what I end up with is this base that I can be really, really creative with. And if I want egg flavor, I'll add eggs as a flavoring agent, not depend on them as a stabilizing agent.
There's so many different ways to infuse flavor into ice cream base. This is where the creativity starts to flow. So, we did all this boring science stuff making an ice cream base. This is where, for me, I have the most fun. Literally, whatever you can dream of, you can make with this ice cream base. If I wanted to make a strawberry ice cream, I could mash some strawberries in here. Pretzel ice cream, I could steep pretzels in this, strain it out. I actually make this in pretty large batches and then I separate it in individual cups and I'll put it in my freezer. So easy. I think of it like chicken stock, right? Like, I want this on hand so that whenever I'm inspired, I can pull this, use it immediately, and have just that instant satisfaction of ice cream.
Today, we're gonna make a chocolate base for this. I'm gonna start with a simple syrup, so it's a quarter cup of sugar and a quarter cup of water.
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I'm going to add a quarter cup of cocoa powder. Just that residual heat is going to cook that cocoa powder in here. You'll see as I'm whisking it together, it's going to start getting nice and glossy.
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From here, I can go straight into the ice cream maker and start spinning our ice cream. I want to take a second to talk about machines. So, we have a few different options on the market. The first and fanciest is an internal compressor machine. These are about $300, but they work great. And the cool thing is that there's a refrigerant on the inside, and I just plug this in, I can use this immediately, as many times in the day as I want.
But when you're at home, honestly, what you're going to find mostly are these pre-freezer bowls. I've got coolant that's all in this bowl. This pre-frozen bowl, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to enter ice cream, and you can find them for relatively cheap, and they work great. Honestly, I would say the only downside is you have to plan in advance, and you can only make one flavor per day.
How these work is exactly the same. I'm freezing on the outside, and I've got a motor that's spinning this blade on the inside. And as it's freezing, it's kind of forming little ice crystals, and those ice crystals are shaved off of the drum by this blade. And the beauty is, because it was so cold in advance, it's ready to go in the ice cream machine. So, with a little preparation, I can make ice cream in 30 minutes on the fly.
I made really gooey brownies that are perfect for ice cream, and so I'm gonna prep those. In the meantime, it's gonna take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to foster the perfect amount of ice crystals. Honestly, what I'm going to look for is, this is a very technical term in our kitchen, we call it a Wendy's Frosty texture.
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Beautiful. I'm gonna start loading in my ice cream, and I load all of my ingredients layer by layer. I also want to work really quickly because I don't want my ice cream to start melting in here. I put a thin layer of parchment paper on top, just so none of the freezer funk gets into my ice cream, and then I'll put it straight in the freezer. I love hardening ice cream for about six hours.
Should we scoop up? You wanna just go for it?
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And that is the perfect scoop of ice cream.
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Um.
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We kept it really simple with this recipe. Wherever you want to take this is going to be really fun, easy, and inspiring.
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It's really good.
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You.