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Dessert

Chocolate Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from cream, milk, eggs, sugar, chocolate, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Melt the chocolate with part of the sugar.

  2. Beat the yolks of the eggs with the remaining sugar.

  3. Heat the milk.

Make the custard

  1. Add the melted chocolate, sugar, and egg yolks to the milk.

  2. Cook in a double boiler for five minutes.

Finish

  1. Once cooled, add the cream, vanilla, and beaten egg whites.

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

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

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they set with gentle heat, giving body and richness.
Chocolate
Provides the main flavor and adds fat that makes the ice cream smooth.
Cream
Adds fat that makes the ice cream rich and creamy rather than icy.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the other ingredients are cooked into.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and lowers the freezing point, keeping the texture softer.

The step that matters

Cook in a double boiler for five minutes. Egg yolks thicken gently as they heat, but too much heat can scramble them into lumps. A double boiler keeps the temperature low and even.

“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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