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Dessert

Philadelphia Coffee Ice Cream

An ice cream made with cream, powdered sugar, and brewed coffee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Philadelphia Coffee Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee base

  1. Grind the coffee coarsely.

  2. Combine the ground coffee with 2 cups of cream in a saucepan over medium heat and heat without boiling for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve, pressing to extract all the coffee flavor.

  4. Add the powdered sugar to the strained mixture and stir until dissolved.

Freeze and serve

  1. Once the mixture is completely cold, add the remaining 2 cups of cream.

  2. Freeze the mixture according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

  3. After freezing, pack the ice cream and let it sit for 2 hours before serving.

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. Cream + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

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 ice cream a smooth, creamy body.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture by lowering the freezing point.
Coffee
Supplies the main coffee flavor, extracted into the warm cream.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture completely before adding the remaining cream. Adding cream to a warm base slows cooling and can cause a grainy or icy texture, because large ice crystals form when the base freezes slowly. Chilling it fully first gives a smoother result.

“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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