Home › Frozen Desserts › Chocolate Ice Cream
Chocolate Ice Cream
Melt 2 squares unsweetened chocolate with half pint cream and proceed as for Philadelphia Ice Cream.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Philadelphia Ice Cream in front of you, which is simply cream, sugar and vanilla frozen without eggs or cooked custard. The chocolate is stirred into part of the cream and the rest of the method is unchanged.
- What the base isA Philadelphia ice cream of this period is plain cream, sugar and vanilla frozen uncooked, commonly about a quart of cream to something under a cup of sugar, though the book's own recipe governs the amounts here. There is no egg and no cooking, so the flavour rests entirely on the quality of the cream.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is 1 ounce of block unsweetened baking chocolate, so this is 2 ounces total. Modern unsweetened baking bars are still sold in 1-ounce portions; do not substitute cocoa powder by weight, and do not use bittersweet chips without cutting the sugar.
- Half pintOne cup. The recipe does not specify whether this cream comes out of the base recipe's quantity or is added to it; taking it from the base is the safer reading. Warm it gently with the chopped chocolate and whisk smooth.
- The hinge: dissolve the sugar in the hot partDissolving the sugar -- Uncooked ice cream can turn gritty if the sugar never fully dissolves. It helps to stir the sugar into the hot chocolate-cream mixture until clear, then whisk that into the cold remaining cream and chill thoroughly before freezing.
- Chill before churningThe original writer had ice and rock salt and plenty of time; a modern machine needs the mixture at refrigerator temperature or below or it will never set. Four hours in the fridge, or overnight, is the difference between ice cream and cold chocolate soup.
- FreezingIn an ice-and-salt freezer the ratio is about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, and the crank is turned steadily for 20 to 30 minutes. In a modern churn, 20 to 25 minutes, then firm in the freezer for two hours.
- Sugar and unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces of unsweetened chocolate is bitter, and depending on how sweet the base recipe is you may want a little extra sugar. Extra sugar also softens the texture, since sugar depresses the freezing point.
- YieldDepends on the base recipe's quantities; from a quart of cream, roughly six to eight servings. Eggless cream ices freeze harder than custard styles, so let it stand five minutes before scooping.
"Philadelphia" ice cream was the American term for the plain, uncooked style: sweetened cream flavoured and frozen, with no eggs and no starch, as distinct from the French custard bases built on yolks. The name is generally traced to the city's early nineteenth-century confectioners and ice-cream gardens, and by the early twentieth century it was a standard heading in frozen-dessert chapters, with flavour variations tacked on beneath it in exactly this shorthand fashion. Frozen-dessert sections in books of this kind tended to be short and formulaic, since a home cook working an ice-and-salt crank freezer wanted a ratio, not an essay. That unsweetened chocolate arrives here in "squares" reflects the era's block chocolate, scored into ounce portions for exactly this kind of casual measuring.