Skip to main content
Dessert

Burnt Filbert Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from roasted hazelnuts, cream, eggs, syrup, and burnt sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Burnt Filbert Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Roast the Barcelona nuts in the oven until well done.

  2. Pound the roasted nuts slightly and mix with some cream.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine the eggs, cream, and syrup; boil until thick.

  2. Strain the thickened mixture through a sieve and freeze.

Burn the sugar and finish

  1. In another saucepan, heat the powdered sugar until it melts and turns a fine brown.

  2. Quickly mix the thickened cream mixture with the burnt sugar, strain again, and freeze.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Cream + syruptop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the custard base as they set when heated, giving the ice cream body.
Cream
Provides richness and fat, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Barcelona nuts
Supply the nutty flavour that is the base of the ice cream.
Powdered sugar
Caramelises when burnt, adding a deep, bittersweet browned flavour.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and helps keep the ice cream soft when frozen.

The step that matters

Heating the powdered sugar to a fine brown. Sugar goes from amber to bitter and burnt within seconds. Removing it from the heat at the right colour gives a pleasant caramel flavour instead of an acrid one.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, syrup, 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.

You might also like

Oranges in SyrupOranges in Syrup9 recipesSyrup SauceSyrup Sauce6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes