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Dessert

Creme Glacee Au Caramel

A French-style ice cream flavored with caramel made from brown sugar, cream, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Creme Glacee Au Caramel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Melt the brown sugar in a frying pan over medium heat, stirring constantly until it becomes liquid.

  2. Do not let the sugar scorch or get too dark.

Combine and freeze

  1. Gradually pour the caramel into the boiling milk, mixing well.

  2. Once cold, strain the mixture into the cream and freeze.

  3. Optionally, whip 1 pint of the cream and fold it in before freezing.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and the deep caramel flavour once melted into a liquid.
Cream
Its fat gives the frozen ice cream a rich, smooth, creamy texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the caramel is dissolved into before chilling and freezing.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar without scorching. Sugar darkens quickly once it passes from liquid into caramel. If it scorches it turns bitter and burnt, and that flavour carries into the whole ice cream base, so the sugar should be stirred constantly and removed before it gets too dark.

“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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