Skip to main content
Dessert

Caramel Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made by mixing caramelized brown sugar with boiling milk and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Heat the brown sugar in an iron frying pan over medium heat, stirring until it becomes liquid and is a light caramel color.

Make the base

  1. Carefully stir the liquid caramel into the boiling milk and strain the mixture.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool, then pour it into the cream, mixing well to combine.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture like vanilla ice 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. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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

Brown sugar
Caramelizes to give the ice cream its deep, sweet, toffee-like flavor and color.
Cream
Provides fat that makes the ice cream rich and smooth in texture.
Milk
Adds liquid and dilutes the caramel so the base is easier to combine and freeze.

The step that matters

Stir the caramel into the boiling milk carefully. Hot caramel hardens and can seize into lumps when it meets cold or liquid, and it can splatter and burn. Adding it slowly to hot milk lets it dissolve evenly into a smooth base.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes