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Dessert

Caramel Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from cream, caramelized sugar, water, sugar, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 and richness, giving the frozen ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Caramelizes into browned, toasty flavor and adds sweetness.
Caramelized sugar
Adds deep caramel flavor and color, along with sweetness, to the cream.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar without stirring. Stirring while the sugar boils can make it crystallize, and once it starts to brown it darkens quickly and can burn. Watch it closely and stop the browning at a golden color.

“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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