This ice cream will expand and fluff up during churning. It is ready when it looks smooth and fluffy, with the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. The total churning time depends on your ice cream maker and could be anywhere from 30-70 minutes.
To evaluate if it is ready, lift a spoonful; it should be thick enough to stand on the spoon, but it will still be soft like soft-serve ice cream. If it looks watery or starts to melt the moment you spoon it, leave it to churn for longer.
In any case, if you feel doubts about the consistency, leave it to churn for ten minutes more. But beware: at this stage, do not expect it to be like store-bought carton ice cream; for now, it should be more like soft-serve ice cream.
It will firm up and become like store-bought ice cream only after it sets in the freezer.
So, stop the ice cream maker when thick and creamy, as described above. If you leave to churn it for much longer, it will start turning grainy.
Note that some ice cream makers are programmed to stop after a specific time, which doesn’t make sense because the ice cream may need to churn for more to reach its fullest potential. So, if you notice that your ice cream maker stops on its own and upon checking the ice cream, you find that it is sloppy instead of fluffy, try to turn the machine on again and leave it to churn until it reaches the desired texture.
4 Responses
I like the idea of demerara sugar which tastes delicious with coffee. I even like molasses with my coffee. When using different sugars like this how would you adjust your recipe? Is there a science or trick I can use rather than trial and error?
I love this question! When using different sugars, it’s important to consider their acidity. Sugars high in molasses, like dark muscovado or dark brown sugar, are acidic and can cause the milk to curdle when heated to dissolve the sugar. In these cases, to dissolve the sugar and bring the mixture to a boil without curdling it, you should cook it in the heavy cream instead of the milk.
For this coffee recipe, you can boil the heavy cream with the sugar, then blend it with half of the cold milk, add the xanthan gum, and then add the remaining cold milk.
As for raw cane sugars like Demerara or Turbinado, I have never encountered a problem when heating them with the milk, but everything is relative, so you may want to add some heavy cream to the milk before boiling it with the sugar to stay on the safe side. This will prevent the milk from curdling.
I hope this explanation helps! Thank you for the great question! 🙂
Can you use coffee flavoring instead of soaking the base in coffee beans?
Yes, you can! But it’s best to use this recipe instead: ;
simply replace the vanilla extract with coffee flavouring.