As the summer settles in, there is no greater joy than a scoop of ice cream on a hot day. No matter your favorite flavor, from simple vanilla to the rockiest rocky road, an ice cream cone is the ultimate way to treat yourself. Near our San Antonio campus, where I am based, we’re lucky…
For chocolate ice cream, cook your ice cream base and immediately pour it over a bowl of finely chopped chocolate. Let the mixture rest for about 5 minutes to help melt the chocolate, then stir gently until it is smooth. You can use any type of chocolate you like, both milk or dark, and can add it to already-flavored ice cream for flavors like mocha or chocolate mint. Milk chocolate ice cream will be sweeter, and dark chocolate ice cream will be more chocolate-forward. Add about 4 ounces of melted chocolate to start, adding more if you like for a deeper flavor. For a super chocolate-forward ice cream, whisk a high-quality cocoa powder into the milk mixture before cooking.
Some ingredients are easy to melt into your warm ice cream base, like peanut butter, tahini, honey, chocolate-hazelnut spread, or jams, but these spreadable-at-room-temperature ingredients can also be swirled into your simple vanilla ice cream after its churned. The best way to achieve the perfect swirl is to transfer about 1/3 of your ice cream to the storage container. Add some of your swirl ingredient, then follow in layers until you’ve used all of the ice cream. Take a butter knife or other long tool, and swirl to distribute the flavors.
The fun in homemade ice cream is in experimentation, so if you don’t make your perfect flavor the first time, keep trying! Take notes so you remember what you’ve tried, and before the summer is up, you just might discover your new favorite.
April Goess ’21 is Director of Education at The Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio, Texas