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Dessert

Caramel Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made by caramelizing sugar with cream and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Caramel Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Combine 4 pounds of sugar and 1 quart of cream in a kettle.

  2. Set the kettle on fire, stirring constantly, and boil until it turns a nice dark brown.

  3. Add another quart of cream and continue boiling.

  4. Continue adding cream in quart increments and boiling until a total of 3 gallons of cream has been added.

Finish and freeze

  1. Remove from heat, let cool, then stir in 2 ounces of vanilla extract.

  2. Freeze the mixture until solid.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Sugar
Caramelizes into a dark, deeply flavored base that gives the ice cream its color and sweetness.
Cream
Adds fat and liquid, making the mixture rich and creamy and diluting the caramel to a pourable base.
Vanilla extract
Adds aroma that rounds out the caramel flavor.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to dark brown. Sugar darkens quickly once it starts to caramelize, and adding cream while it is very hot makes it bubble up sharply. Stirring constantly keeps the sugar from scorching in spots, and removing it at the right colour controls bitterness.

“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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