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Dessert

Almond Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from almonds, cream, and clarified sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Almond Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almonds

  1. Blanch the sweet and bitter almonds.

  2. Pound the almonds very fine in a mortar.

  3. Mix the ground almonds with ½ pint of cream and let steep for a short time.

  4. Squeeze the cream from the almonds using a napkin, twisting tightly to extract all the cream.

Make and freeze

  1. Add 1 pint more cream and enough clarified sugar to sweeten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Provide the main almond flavour and body once pounded and steeped in cream.
Bitter almonds
Add a concentrated, aromatic almond flavour in small quantity.
Cream
Carries the almond flavour and gives the ice cream its rich, smooth texture.
Clarified sugar
Sweetens the mixture and softens the texture of the frozen ice cream.

The step that matters

Squeezing the cream from the almonds. Twisting the napkin tightly extracts the flavoured cream from the ground almond pulp. Leaving cream behind wastes flavour and can make the base less aromatic.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, 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.

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