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Dessert

Philadelphia Coffee Ice Cream

A coffee-flavored 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 cream

  1. Grind the coffee coarsely.

  2. Combine the coffee with 1 pint of cream in a saucepan over medium heat and let it sit 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 and stir until dissolved.

Freeze and serve

  1. Once the mixture is completely cold, add the remaining pint 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 texture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Coffee
Supplies the main flavor and aroma of the ice cream.

The step that matters

Letting the coffee steep without boiling. Boiling can make coffee taste bitter and burnt, so the mixture should only sit warm over medium heat to extract flavor gently.

“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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