Skip to main content
Dessert

Caramel Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with caramel, cream, and whipped cream, set with gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Caramel Ice Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Soak the gelatin in the milk until dissolved.

  2. In a saucepan, heat the sugar until it becomes liquid and turns a rich brown.

  3. Add the water to the caramel and stir until dissolved, about 15 minutes.

Make the base

  1. Pour the caramel into the cream and stir in the dissolved gelatin.

  2. Fold in the whipped cream and freeze the mixture.

Freeze and ripen

  1. After freezing, remove the paddles and repack the ice cream.

  2. Allow the ice cream to ripen for 3 hours.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Gelatine
Helps the ice cream hold its body and stay smooth by limiting large ice crystals.
Granulated sugar
Becomes the caramel, adding deep sweetness and a toasted flavour.
Cream
Provides fat that makes the ice cream rich and creamy.
Whipped cream
Adds air, making the frozen texture lighter and softer.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar. Sugar darkens quickly near the end, and past a rich brown it turns bitter and can burn. Removing it at the right colour keeps the caramel flavour pleasant and balanced.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes