Dark Chocolate Gelato

This is the best chocolate gelato I could make 🙂

As a chocolatier I was looking for getting through the summer months which are slow for the chocolate business. Many of us make some ice cream or gelato during these months in case we have the equipment do to so. Here in Norway there was a review on artisan ice cream makers and one comment got my interest: “There is not really a great chocolate ice cream in the Norwegian market”. The kind of person I am has to rise up to a challenge like this. So I set out to design a new chocolate ice cream.

Design criteria

I am intolerant to many foods, also lactose, so I wanted to have a chocolate ice cream I can actually eat myself, even be it in little amounts. My ice cream recipes therefore should have:

• No gluten
• No eggs
• Real chocolate (not cocoa) powder

Using real chocolate creates the possibility to use any kind of high quality couverture from any brand. Because of this, you get access to hundreds of beautiful chocolate flavors and you just pick the one you like best. Cocoa powders are very limited in that way as there are far less high quality cocoa powders available.

What chocolate did I choose?

Well, of course I choose my favorite chocolate. There are many very good brands of chocolate couverture. Couverture is chocolate used by professionals to create for example bonbons, enrobe cookies and much more. As I grew up near the Belgian border I choose the Callebaut 811. This high quality chocolate is for me the gold standard. It has a deep chocolate taste, but not too strong with 54% of cocoa solids. As a chocolatier, I wanted a chocolate which let me create new flavors. The job of the chocolate is in my opinion just that. To provide the chocolate taste. I do not want the chocolate to have all kinds of other flavors. Just chocolate. So this is the one for me: chocolate, with very little acidity or bitterness. Very well balanced. High quality and consistent.

About the ingredients

In most cases I go for taste. Here in Norway the quality of raw ingredients is amazing. The milk and cream are from local cows happily wandering free most of the time. To get the best gelato, look for the best ingredients you can afford. Organic, or even bio dynamic if you can get it in your area. I try to shop from local producers as much as possible. This brings a couple of things:

• beautiful taste
• always a little different
• supporting the local community
• supporting small businesses

To pasteurize or not?

In a commercial business you have to pasteurize, there is no way around it. Pasteurization removes harmful bacteria that cause illnesses. For use at home you don’t have to do it as you are probably using already pasteurized milk and cream. For the stabilizer to work best I always take the ice cream mix to just above 80 degrees Celsius (175 Fahrenheit) for at least 30 seconds.

The International Diary Foods Association (IDFA) shows the following pasteurization times on their website for diary mixes with sugar, fat and so forth added:

Note: regulations might differ per country

As a rule of thumb, better be safe then sorry 🙂

Churning ice cream

Well, here is the thing. There are many ways of doing this. At home you probably do not have a professional machine. But better machines give better results. Here the design of the machine is of importance as better churning results in smaller ice crystals. And we want them as small as we can get them.

The Musso Stella/Lello I use is excellent. Is it the best? I honestly don’t know but you can run it all day at 4 liters gelato every hour and have your own micro artisanal ice cream factory. People just love seeing this.

I like it because it is easy to use, easy to clean and I am able to add some ingredients (like nuts or chocolate flaxes) when the ice cream is almost finished and have it mix them through the ice cream for me. Most importantly: the structure and mouthfeel of the ice cream is fantastic. I will do an extensive review an other day, but here is a link to amazon where you can read the reviews.

Free to use

It took me a very long time to develop and perfect this recipe. You are free to use it, but it would be nice to include some form of attribution in case you use it commercially. But anyways, it is free to use.

Dark Chocolate Gelato

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• Author: Richard
• Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
• Yield: 1000g 1x
• Diet: Gluten Free

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Description

Dark chocolate gelato made with chocolate couverture and filled with chocolate chips. Absolutely delicious.

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Ingredients

Units MUS Scale 1x2x3x

• 180g of Callebaut 811
• 450g whole milk
• 160g full cream
• 50g glucose syrup or golden syrup or simple syrup
• 10g milk powder
• 150g sugar
• 1.5g stabilizer
• tiny bit of sweet chili powder (optional)
• chocolate chips for that extra dimension
• some leaves of mint or basil for decoration

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Instructions

1. Mix the stabilizer with the sugar and the milk powder so there are no more lumps and everything is evenly mixed.
2. Put milk, cream, syrup in a cooking pot (double capacity that you are making).
3. Add the stabilizer/sugar/milkpowder mixture.
4. Add the optional chili powder if you want
5. Heat it till just over 80 Celsius (175 Fahrenheit). 
6. Keep it over 80 Celsius (175 Fahrenheit) for at least 30 seconds while stirring the mixture well (I use a whisk).
7. Take the pot of the stove.
8. Add the chocolate (Callebaut has nice callets that dissolve super fast).
9. The temperature will drop quickly because of the callets.
10. Keep stirring till all the chocolate has completely melted.
11. Put the pot with the ice cream mixture in a large bowl of ice water in order to cool the mixture as quickly as possible. Refresh the ice water when it feels warm.
12. Put the mixture in the fridge and let it cool completely down.
13. Take it out of the fridge and put it in the ice cream machine.
14. Churn it in your ice cream machine
15. When the ice cream is almost done, add chocolate chips if your machine allows it
16. Otherwise you can manually add when serving or before storing.
17. Serve straight from the machine or let harden in the freezer.
18. Bon appétit!

Notes

You can use any high quality couverture whether it be Callebaut, Valrhona, Felchin, Cacao Barry for example.

It is possible to change the couverture for milk or white chocolate couverture. Recipe and the way you make it is exactly the same.

Adding a hint of sweet chili powder gives an extra dimension to the ice cream. Use very little as this is not about making chili ice cream but enhancing the taste of chocolate.

• Prep Time: 60
• Cook Time: 10
• Category: Gelato
• Cuisine: Italian