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Dessert

Coffee Bombe

A frozen coffee dessert made with roasted coffee, cream, eggs, sugar, gelatin, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Coffee Bombe

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the cream

  1. In a saucepan, heat the coffee-berries over medium heat, shaking until hot.

  2. Pour the cream over the heated coffee and cover the saucepan; let it sit hot (but not boiling) for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the cream to remove the coffee-berries.

Make the custard

  1. In a thick saucepan, combine the egg yolks, sugar, and strained cream.

  2. Dissolve the gelatine in ½ cup of hot water and set aside.

  3. Whip the ½ pint of cream to stiff peaks.

  4. Heat the saucepan with the egg mixture over low heat, stirring until it thickens.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the dissolved gelatine for 2 minutes.

Assemble and freeze

  1. Quickly fold in the whipped cream until just combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a tightly covered mold and freeze as directed for frozen puddings, or into paper cases and freeze for 3 hours.

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).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Coffee-berries
Provide the coffee flavour that is steeped into the cream.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness through emulsifying fats.
Gelatine
Sets the mixture so it holds its shape when frozen.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the frozen dessert.
Sugar
Sweetens the dessert and softens its texture when frozen.

The step that matters

Heating the egg mixture gently. Egg yolks scramble if heated too fast or too hot, which curdles the custard. Low heat and constant stirring thicken it smoothly, and the gelatine must be stirred in while the custard is still warm rather than boiling.

“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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