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Coffee Ice Cream

A custard ice cream flavored with coffee, vanilla, and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Coffee Ice Cream

Why it works: Vanilla and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Coffee Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee milk

  1. Pour the milk over the coffee and bring to a boil.

  2. Boil slowly for ten minutes, then allow it to settle and cool.

  3. Drain off the milk and strain it, adding enough more milk to make one quart.

Make the custard

  1. Combine this with the cream, eggs, and sugar to make a custard.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Vanilla + milktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Coffee + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,391 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the custard and add richness and structure to the frozen ice cream.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the ice cream smooth and rich.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and keeps the frozen ice cream softer and scoopable.
Ground coffee
Infuses the milk with coffee flavor, which carries into the custard.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for ten minutes. Boiling the milk over coffee too hard can scorch it or make it bitter. A gentle boil extracts flavor cleanly and keeps the milk from catching on the pan.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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