The Problems
Our Solutions
Recipe 1: “Double Origin” Chocolate Ice Cream
(to make 1000g / 1.2L Updated 4-2019)
Milk Fat: 10.2%
Total Solids: 43.1%
Solids Nonfat: 27.6%
Milk Solids Nonfat: 5%
Acidity: 0.08%
Alcohol: 0.5%
Stabilizer/Emulsifier: 0.38%
Egg Lecithin: 0%
POD: 100 / 1000g
PAC: 227 / 1000g
Recipe 2: Single Origin Cocoa Ice Cream
Appendix 1. Some Chocolate Basics
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Cocoa beans fresh out of the roaster. Thanks to Michael Laiskonis at the ICE Chocolate Lab. |
Cocoa % or cocoa solids %: In plain chocolates—unflavored and non-milk chocolates—this refers to everything besides sugar. It’s the cocoa mass from the cocoa pod. It will be very roughly half cocoa, half cocoa butter. So a 70% dark chocolate will be about 35% cocoa, 35% cocoa butter, 30% sugar. With some chocolates the cocoa butter can be as high as 60 or 65%. And with some specialty chocolates it can be as low as 45%. The best chocolate producers publish this information, so you don’t have to guess at what you’re working with.
Cocoa Powder Types: “Dutch” process cocoas are treated with an alkali, which alters the appearance and flavor. Dutched powders will be a darker, richer red, but the flavor will be milder, with less bitterness and astringency. Since dairy and sugar both take the edge off of chocolate’s flavors, you may find you can get a more intense flavor experience from natural process cocoas.
That is, if all else is equal. Which it never is. Most European cocoas are only available as Dutch process. The quality of the individual powder is more important than any theoretical difference in its processing method.
In baking, the distinction is important; if you switch between Dutch and natural, you’ll change the pH, and will often have to compensate with changes to your leavening ingredients. This is one area where ice cream is more forgiving. We only worry about about the fat and the flavor.
Which brings us to the fat: check the cocoa butter percentage. Cocoa usually has more than you’d expect, and the high-end brands (annoyingly) usually have the most. Be prepared to compensate for high fat levels.
Appendix 1. Chocolate Variety Tasting Notes
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Similar to the Coffee Wheel. Courtesy Barry Callebaut |
In Conclusion Refutation
Appendix 2. Chocolate Review Sites
Appendix 3. Where to buy Chocolate
Appendix 4. The Future: Single Origin Cocoa Powders
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Bensdorp / Callebaut Natural Process São Tomé |
(Ecuador)
(Ghana)
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What is the difference between cocoa powder and cocoa nibs? Can nibs be easily converted into suitable powder? I've noticed that single origin nibs are much easier to source.
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My first chocolate batches were rock solid, and they remained so even after resting at room temperature for up to half an hour. What wasn't rock solid was either melted ice cream or the few chunks and scrapes I was able to break off of the primary mass. And those pieces could hardly be called "chewable", at least not in any normal sense of the word.
For my most recent batch, I followed your single-origin recipe closely, resulting in relatively identical values for each category. Of course, I make a few modifications to reduce carbohydrates, but it is otherwise quite similar. It is certainly not soft out of the freezer, but only a five to ten minute rest is required to get a decent piece. It is still hard, but not nearly as bad as the first batches.
What can I do to continue to improve this aspect of my chocolate ice cream? Ideally, I would like to be able to scoop it right out of the freezer, but I'm not sure what commercial makers do to make that possible. If I can't scoop it right out, I would like a better texture after a brief rest. My very first caramel ice cream was scoopable out of the freezer days after I made it. It had all the flavor of home made ice cream with the texture of a commercial batch. I wish I could replicate that with my chocolate ice cream.
Here's a brief look at my macros by percent for a 1016 gram batch:
Water Gums Yolks Fat Milk Fat MSNF Sugar Other solids Total solids POD PAC55.4 0.250 0.0 13.0 12.0 8.0 15.2 8.8 45.4 130 437
Any ideas would be more than welcome. Thanks! -Woody
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I'm having trouble reading the numbers you posted (not your fault; I'm having problems with the way WordPress messes with comment formatting). So my answers will be more general.
I'm assuming you've read the Sugars in Ice Cream post (https://under-belly.org/sugars-in-ice-cream/) and the Solids/Water/Ice post (https://under-belly.org/ice-cream-solids-water-ice/).
Excessive hardness in chocolate ice cream is either from too much water ice or too much cocoa butter.
We solve the water ice problem by increasing the solids (which reduces the water %), or by depressing the freezing point. We mostly use sugars for this (including the lactose in milk and skim milk powder). These methods reduce the ice fraction—the percentage of the mix made up by frozen water.
We solve the cocoa butter problem by either reducing the amount of it (more cocoa powder, less couverture) or by using freezing point depression and solids level to drop the ice fraction even lower—compensating for the hard fats by reducing the amount of ice.
You say you're reducing the total level of carbohydrates in your formulas. How are you doing this? Are you sure that you're calculating the freezing point depression correctly for the ingredients you're using?
A note on freezers: unless you're using a commercial dipping cabinet, your freezer is probably colder than what's ideal for serving ice cream. It ought to be. Dipping cabinets are typically around -14°C (7°F), or for Italian-style gelatos, as warm as -11°C (12°F). A standard freezer should be -18°F (0°F) or even a little colder.
So it's perfectly reasonable for ice cream to be too hard to scoop right out of the freezer. But it shouldn't be like concrete, as is the case with many home ice cream recipes or unbalanced commercial low-sugar ice creams.
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Take a look at what happened at Jeni's Homemade several years ago: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2016/08/130962/
Their kitchen was a certified milk processing facility, with a staff food safety expert and twice-monthly official health inspections. And still, they had two major incidents where listeria was found onsite, and ice cream had to be recalled nationally to keep anyone from getting sick or dying. The burden of dealing with raw milk safely ended up being too much for them, and they eventually offloaded most of their process to a commercial dairy.
If you're a small shop or pastry kitchen or are doing this at home, you are taking big risks for very little benefit. And unless you plan to invest in a homogenizer, your ice cream will be worse for it.
I'd recommend instead buying organic, homogenized, low-temperature pasteurized milk and cream from a local dairy or farm cooperative. You'll get all the benefits and none of the risks or problems.
As far as stabilizers, just use the right ingredients. There's nothing unnatural about gums. Locust bean gum is essentially a flour made from nuts of a carob tree. Carob is the same stuff hippies use as a chocolate substitute. Guar gum is just a flour made from guar beans. Carrageenan is an extract from seaweed. If you look hard enough, you can probably find certified organic versions of these, but my position is: why bother. It's all good stuff, and it will make up just a fraction of a percent of the ice cream.
For emulsifiers, lecithin is fine (get good stuff that has virtually no flavor. I have good luck with Will Powder). And don't overlook plain old organic egg yolks, for flavors that play well with egg.
For chocolate, use whatever you like, but do an honest blind taste comparison before you choose. Much of the certified organic chocolate and "cacao" powders don't taste very good. Meanwhile, almost all the highest quality, single-origin chocolate is organically produced. It's just not certified, because none of these plantations in the middle of the tropics is paying for US or European certification. But they're growing the cocoa the way they've done it for a hundred years, and there's very little about their process that's been modernized, for better and for worse.
As you can probably tell, I care much more about ice cream flavor, texture, and quality than I care about any kind of "label friendliness." I'm not going to sacrifice actual quality to satisfy an uneducated customer's misplaced ideas about quality. It's almost a moral stand—I want reason and knowledge to prevail over prejudice and ignorance. If we can't make this happen with ice cream, how can we expect it to happen in global politics?
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I might be talked out of this position. Dana Cree, in her excellent book "Hello, My Name is Ice Cream," argues from a pastry chef's perspective. She correctly notes that people are hard-wired with cognitive biases, and that we taste things with our eyes as much as with our mouths and noses. She thinks its a cook's duty to tailor food to all the senses, and if this means adding color, so be it.
She briefly covers ways of using color ingredients like beet juice, annatto, turmeric, spirulina, blue majik, blueberry juice, activated charcoal, and cocoa powder. There are also ways to extract pure chlorophyl from herbs that she doesn't cover, but that you can find elsewhere online.
I may experiment with some of these ingredients, and I'll write about it if I do. In the mean time, check out Cree's book. I will definitely be writing a review of this book soon, along with a few others.
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Reading your post seems to make fat the biggest problem with chocolate ice cream. According to Corvitto it is cocoa butter and nonfat cocoaas the negative PAC of chocolate consists of the factor -1.8 for the nonfat solid and -0.9 for the butter. Your cocoa powder has 22g of butter and 88g of nonfat powder and therefore 22*-0.9=-19.8 and -158.4 => -178.2
I guess that your recipe is working anyway and not rock solid at a serving temperatur of -11 °C. So I wonder where the miscalculation in Corvitto's formula comes from. Could you explain?