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Dessert

Caramel Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with caramelized sugar, milk, egg yolks, granulated sugar, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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. In a saucepan, heat 4 heaping tablespoons of sugar until it melts, smokes, and boils.

Make the custard

  1. Boil 2 cups of milk in a separate pot.

  2. Beat the yolks of 4 eggs and stir them into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the burnt sugar to the milk mixture and mix well.

  4. Stir in 2 small cups of granulated sugar.

Chill and finish

  1. Cool the mixture on ice.

  2. Before freezing, add 1 pint of cream.

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

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

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 and add richness to the ice cream base.
Sugar
Melts and browns to make caramel, then adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the yolks and caramel are stirred into.
Cream
Adds fat for a smoother, creamier texture after freezing.

The step that matters

Cooking the caramel. Sugar goes from melted to smoking and burnt within moments. Taking it just to a deep amber keeps flavour rich, while over-browning makes it bitter and harder to blend smoothly into the milk.

“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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