Best Chocolate Ice Cream Ever!

Creamy and delectable chocolate home-made ice-cream!

I am a stickler for wholesome ingredients.  A natural predisposition for a food lover, one could say. So, imagine my horror when I actually read off the label of regular store- bought ice-cream.

Anybody would reasonably think that ice–cream was made from milk, right?

Wrong! 


Not only there wasn’t any milk (you can forget cream at this stage) but there was a whole host of stuff and stabilizers that would give your tongue a cramp trying to pronounce them.  I would certainly count vague descriptions like “milk derivatives” as being less than wholesome from the real stuff!

Further scrutiny revealed that brands like Haagen Daz, Bulla, Ben and Jerry’s DO actually contain wholesome cream and milk.  Noted also the distinctive price premium and superior taste of these ice creams over the regular supermarket types.

So I thought I'd give making my own ice cream a shot using the finest ingredients I could get my hands on. I tried out this ice-cream recipe which came with one of my cooking gadgets - the Thermomix TM31.


Instead of just cocoa, I used a bar of dark belgian chocolate. Also, I reduced the sugar content by 1/3 of the recommended quantity bearing in mind that the sugar in Malaysia seems to be way sweeter compared to the same amount of sugar purchased overseas. Don't know why - just an observation.


So here's the finished product. The best chocolate ice cream ever !  It was such a hit with adults and kids alike.  The texture was smooth and creamy with more bite than your regular generic ice cream.  To be  honest, it costs nearly as much as Ben and Jerry's and Haagen Daz to make at home but hey, I have  control over ingredients used and it was absolutely AWESOME!


And to top it all, the ice-cream was extremely easy and fuss-free to make using my Thermomix TM31 (picture shown below). Only took 6 minutes cooking time, 6 hours of freezing, 30 seconds of blending and a further 6 hours of freezing - which means that my active involvement in the entire ice-cream making process was just less than 10 minutes!

CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM RECIPE (Serves 10)

Ingredients :

250 g fresh milk

250 g cream

100 g dark chocolate bar

100 g sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence ( I didn't have vanilla pods with me this time around)

2 egg yolks

Here's how to do it:

Measure your milk, cream and sugar in the TM31 using the inbuilt weighing scale.

Add the egg yolks and vanilla essence.

 Set the gadget to cook for 5 minutes at 80 degrees at speed 4. What the gadget does is ensure that the temperature never exceeds 80 degrees while automatically stirring for you. This prevents the mixture from curdling. 

For those who prefer to cook manually, you can achieve the same results on the stove by applying indirect heat through "double-boiling", continuous stirring and removing from the heat when necessary to prevent curdling.

Add the dark chocolate and cook for a further 1 minute or until chocolate dissolves.

The custard will look frothy and taste like warm chocolate milkshake at this point.

Pour the mixture into any freezer friendly container for freezing. Cover and pop into the freezer for about 6 hours or until the mixture is semi solid

Cut the frozen custard into blocks for ease of blending later. The frozen custard should be semi solid. (I'd forgotten and left mine in the freezer for a good 8 hours but the results were still great.)

 I popped the blocks of frozen custard back into the TM31 and just beat/blended it for 30 seconds at speed 9. (You can also do this manually using a handblender or a cake mixer - the whole idea about this process is just to air or aerate the mixture for that lighter, fluffier texture).

The semi frozen mixture looks thick and creamy at this point.

Pour the aerated mixture into a freezer friendly container, place the lid on and pop it into the freezer for the final time. The ice cream should be ready in 6-8 hours. 

I placed mine overnight and it was good to go the next day. Best eaten within a week or 2, I was told. I don't really know first hand as yet - mine disappeared within 2 days :)

One of my friends is going to try this recipe manually (on the stove the traditional way). I'm eager to know the results of her tryst and will certainly note it here when she does.