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 Ice Cream
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Crush ice in a coffee sack using a mallet until very fine.
Mix three parts ice with one part coarse sea salt and pack into the freezer.
Wash the freezer with baking soda. Scald and cool it before use.
Make the custard
Boil the milk and coffee together with the sugar.
Dissolve the corn starch and egg yolks in ½ cup of warm milk. Add the dissolved mixture to the boiling mixture.
Let the mixture simmer. Cool it before freezing.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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.
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Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
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Milk + coffeetop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together2,202 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
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Corn + milktop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,955 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
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Corn + coffeetop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together247 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Cream + coffeetop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,339 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Egg yolks
- Add richness and help the custard thicken as it cooks.
- Corn starch
- Thickens the custard so the finished ice cream is smooth rather than icy.
- Cream
- Adds fat, which gives the ice cream a rich, smooth texture.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point for a softer texture.
The step that matters
Add the dissolved mixture to the boiling mixture. Adding the starch and yolk mixture to a boiling base can cause the eggs to scramble and the starch to clump. Keeping the heat controlled while stirring helps the custard thicken evenly.
“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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