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Dessert

Coffee Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from coffee, cream, sugar, vanilla, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Coffee Ice Cream

Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee extract

  1. Put the coffee in a heated pot and pour the boiling water over it.

  2. Let the coffee steep on the back of the range for 5 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through double cheesecloth, pressing hard to extract all the flavor.

  4. Cool the coffee extract.

Make the base

  1. Scald half of the cream and all of the sugar.

  2. Chill the scalded mixture.

  3. Mix the cooled coffee extract with the chilled cream and sugar.

  4. Add the vanilla extract.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture.

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.

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.

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

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

  2. Coffee + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,391 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

  4. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

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

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

Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the frozen ice cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the texture by lowering the freezing point.
Pulverized coffee
Provides the coffee flavor when steeped in boiling water and strained into an extract.

The step that matters

Pressing the coffee through double cheesecloth. Pressing hard extracts more flavor, but it can also push through fine grounds that cloud the extract. Straining through double cheesecloth catches the grounds so the ice cream stays smooth and the coffee flavor is clean.

“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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