Skip to main content
Dessert

Almond, or Orgeat Ice Cream

A custard ice cream flavored with sweet and bitter almonds, orange‑flower water, and powdered sugar.

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

Why it works: Almond and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,125 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Almond, or Orgeat Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Crack the sweet and bitter almonds and bake them in the oven.

  2. Pound the baked almonds in a mortar, adding orange‑flower water as needed.

Make the custard base

  1. Mix the pounded almonds with the fresh cream, egg yolks, and powdered sugar.

  2. Stir well and heat the mixture on the stove until combined.

  3. Chill the mixture.

Freeze

  1. Freeze it as you would for custard ice.

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. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard base and add richness as they set during gentle heating.
Fresh cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the frozen ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Sweet almonds
Supply the main almond flavour and fat once baked and pounded.
Powdered loaf sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the freezing texture by lowering the freezing point.
Bitter almonds
Add a concentrated almond aroma in small amounts.

The step that matters

Heating the mixture with the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble if the mixture gets too hot. Heat gently and stir well so the custard thickens smoothly rather than curdling.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, cream, egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, cream, egg, sugar. 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.

More almond ice cream recipes

Burnt 7 See all 33 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes