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Dessert

Avocado Ice Cream

A custard-based ice cream made with avocado, egg yolks, sugar, milk, and flavored with almond and vanilla extracts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Avocado and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Avocado Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, egg yolks, and 1 cup of sugar to make a boiled custard. Cook over medium heat until thickened, then remove from heat and let cool.

Prepare the avocado

  1. Mash the avocados into a pulp and mix with the remaining 1 cup of sugar and almond extract.

Combine and freeze

  1. Once the custard is cool, fold in the avocado mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Serve

  1. Serve in mounds, garnished with a green maraschino cherry on top of each dish.

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. Avocado + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Almond + vanillatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

  5. Avocado + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard base and add richness as they set when cooked.
Avocados
Provide the creamy body and smooth, rich texture of the ice cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the texture by lowering the freezing point.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the custard is cooked from and frozen.

The step that matters

Cook the custard until thickened. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with gentle heat. Undercooked custard stays runny and can taste of raw egg, while overheating can curdle it, so cook over medium heat only until it coats a spoon.

Swap the avocado

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, milk, almond, vanilla):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Avocadothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, almond, vanilla. 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.

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