Coffee Ice Cream

A lot of coffee ice creams contain dairy. That’s fine and very delicious, but it can cover up the coffee flavor a bit. In contrast, the goal of this specific recipe is to celebrate the coffee itself and to bring it out as much as possible in the finished ice cream.

This recipe and the idea for “pure” coffee ice cream is originally based on James Hoffmann’s recipe for coffee ice cream. I changed it quite a bit though.

Changes

The most notable changes are:

• I significantly decreased the amount of salt. When using the 5.5 g from the original recipe, I got a notable saltiness in the result.

• I removed the cocoa butter. This has a few reasons:

  • While the cocoa butter itself smells good, I noticed that when adding it to the mixture, the combined aromas resulted in a smell that was just not very pleasant to me in a way that’s hard to describe. The closest adjective I can muster is “dirty”. This aroma persisted in the finished ice cream and constituted as a somewhat unpleasant aftertaste.

    Simply removing the cocoa butter improved the flavor while making the process easier. The texture is just as great as before, which might also be in part thanks to the inulin I added, see the inulin section on my ice cream notes page.

  • Also, when using the cocoa butter, the ice cream melts in an unpleasant way: you can see fatty smudges in the thawing liquid. Doesn’t look very appetizing. Removing the cocoa butter got rid of that, improving the texture and look of the melting ice cream. If I had wanted to keep the cocoa butter, adding an emulsifier might’ve been worth a try.

  • With no upsides to the using the cocoa butter as far as I can tell, having the ice cream be fully fat-free (well, except a tiny bit in the cocoa powder) is nice.

• I use carob bean gum and xanthan as thickening agents rather than locust bean gum and lambda carrageenan. See the thickening agents section on my ice cream notes page.

• The original recipe used 100 g of water to boil and make a syrup base from the sugar before adding the coffee. I removed this step in order to simplify the process. At least the gums I’m using don’t need to be heated to be activated, and the sugars dissolve just fine directly in the coffee without boiling first.

• I also removed the water from the syrup step entirely, in order to have more pure coffee in the ice cream. For me, the recipe after removing the water with just the coffee yields pretty much exactly the amount of mixture to fill one Ninja Creami pint.

• I added other sugar types and tweaked the ratio to get the total sugar content and freezing point up to a more optimal point for a better texture. See the sugars section on my ice cream notes page.

working time:20 min ice cream vegan vegetarian

Servings:
× pint Reset

Mix Dry Ingredients

Mix in a bowl.

Note: Salt is a bitterness blocker – the idea in adding a bit of salt is to suppress some of the coffee’s bitterness, but not enough for any saltiness to come through.

Add Wet Ingredients

• While mixing with a whisk, slowly add the coffee.
• Add the syrup.
• Keep mixing until all solids are fully dissolved.

Cool Mixture Down

All Ingredients