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Dessert

Nougat Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with custard, cream, nuts, and flavorings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Hazelnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 186 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nougat Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk, sugar, egg yolks, and salt until thickened.

  2. Strain the custard and cool.

Prepare the cream and nuts

  1. Beat the cream until stiff peaks form.

  2. Fold the beaten cream into the cooled custard.

  3. Chop the nuts finely.

Freeze and serve

  1. Add the chopped nuts, beaten egg whites, and flavoring extracts to the mixture.

  2. Freeze the mixture according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

  3. Let it stand for four hours before serving.

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.

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. Hazelnut + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Hazelnut + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Almond + nutstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 recipes

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

  5. Filbert + nutstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together38 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Add airy lightness to the frozen mixture when beaten and folded in.
Thick cream
Adds fat and creaminess, and whipping it adds air for a lighter texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that becomes the ice cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and softens the texture of the frozen ice cream.

The step that matters

Heat the custard until thickened. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but overheating can scramble them into lumps. Heat gently and stop once the custard coats a spoon.

Swap the filbert

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, hazelnut, walnut, almond, meat, nuts, milk):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Brazil nutfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Filbertthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, hazelnut, walnut, almond, meat, nuts, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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