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Dessert

Caramel Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made by mixing caramelized sugar, cream, and water, then freezing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Caramel Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Boil 1 cup of sugar with ¼ cup of water without stirring until it begins to brown.

  2. Stir until it reaches a golden brown color.

  3. Add ½ cup of water and stir until dissolved.

Make the ice cream

  1. Add the caramelized sugar and salt to the cream and mix well.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat that makes the ice cream rich, smooth and creamy.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and keeps the frozen texture softer by lowering its freezing point.
Caramelized sugar
Adds toasty, bittersweet caramel flavor and a golden color.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar without stirring. Sugar boiled without stirring browns evenly, while stirring too early can make it crystallize. Once it turns golden it darkens quickly, and over-browned sugar tastes bitter and burnt, so watch it closely.

“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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