- Today we're gonna make a coffee ice cream
unlike any coffee ice cream you've had before.
Probably, I mean, I don't know your life
but here's the idea behind what we're doing.
Most coffee ice creams are kind of dairy-based.
They're kind of cappuccino ice creams and they're delicious.
They're delicious.
But, what if you made something that was
a coffee coffee ice cream,
and not like a dairy coffee ice cream.
Traditionally, that doesn't really work very well.
You might have had like an espresso granita at some point
in your life that was punishing on just about every level.
If you like that, that's not a judgment.
They're just very bitter, they're kind of grainy.
The reason I thought this was a good idea to try
is that my friend Chris made a video about this thing.
It's called the Ninja CREAMi, which is a terrible name,
and it's a sort of ice cream machine, sort of.
I got weird about ice cream at one point in my life
and restaurants have a thing called a Pacojet.
Now a Pacojet is basically a drill press
with a spinning blade attached, that you sort of
push through a frozen tub of ice cream base.
So you freeze it solid as a block
and then the Pacojet basically slices it down
to be ice cream again, which is weird, but really cool.
But they're like six grand.
This is a domestic version of a Pacojet basically,
and it's £180, which is still expensive
but a lot cheaper than £6,000.
And actually cheaper than some
fancy, fancy ice cream machines, and it works the same way.
Right you put a solid block of frozen ice cream base in it.
It's got a little blade in here like this
that just gets pressed through that solid block.
It's amazing, it's very cool.
This is not a sponsored video.
I bought this, this is not like an endorsement thing.
Ninja have no idea I'm making this video.
I just thought it was cool,
and it let me do some experiments.
Now the first experiment was,
what if you just take some really nice brewed coffee,
sweeten it, freeze it, and then turn that into ice cream.
Which is what I did.
Let me get that now.
This is most definitely not ice cream
or sorbet at this point it's just a a solid block.
For this I brewed a little Kenyan coffee,
shout out Tim Wendelboe, very delicious.
All right, it's in, it's loaded.
Lock it in like that.
And then it's gonna take it like a minute
to just basically press that blade through the whole tub.
Let's do sorbet.
(machine whirs)
(machine roars)
Let's have a look.
(James chuckles)
So that looks, that looks like ice cream,
that is brewed coffee and sugar, and that's it.
It's very exciting, from a texture perspective.
Now I'll say, or at this point,
for this recipe that I'll show you in a minute,
you don't need one of these,
you can use any ice cream machine that you might have.
This was just interesting from a texture point of view.
And plus I've wanted a Pacojet for like a decade.
All right, let's have a little taste.
So creamy, weird.
Here's the problem, firstly, and this is kind of weird.
It tastes of coffee, but this was a vibrant, interesting,
well-brewed Kenyan coffee, like tons of character.
It gets really, really muted by the whole thing.
It has a kind of generic coffeeness that comes through,
but all of the character just doesn't, it's too cold.
Which kind of bummed me out.
Secondly, even though this is a light roast,
and it's brewed well, it has this bitterness in the finish.
And so, one of the reasons I went with filter coffee,
like a V60, is that it's kind of a lower bitterness
than say espresso that you might dilute down,
but it still has this kind of harshness in the finish
that kind of takes away the joy
that you wanna experience with good coffee.
So, to counteract all of this,
I decided to set out to create a kind of different
sort of coffee ice cream recipe.
What I'll do now is show you what I did,
what each ingredient is kind of doing,
and how you might wanna adapt it around the coffee
that you want to turn into delicious ice cream.
Credit where credit is due:
this recipe was adapted from one from ChefSteps
for a roasted cocoa gelato,
that was kind of interesting dairy-free ice cream.
That was a kind of inspiring sort of starting point for me,
and then I've adapted it from there.
So first up we're gonna make some dry ingredients
120 grams of sugar.
I tried using a brown sugar,
it kind of competes with the flavor of coffee.
So just stick with plain white sugar if you can.
Second up, five and a half grams of salt.
That's gonna do quite a lot of the work
to counteract the bitterness at the back end of the coffee.
It's not gonna taste salty, it's just gonna be delicious.
Then we're gonna add a couple of gums.
These are the ones in the ChefSteps recipe
that sort of really helped.
First up is a gram of lambda carrageenan,
and then another gram of locust bean gum.
Now gums are really interesting,
they do some useful things.
They help sort of produce a creamier texture,
and they also slow the melt of the ice cream,
which is on a hot day, a good thing.
You're gonna whisk these together so they're combined
just so that they're easily distributed into the water.
Now you're gonna put this into about 100 mls of water
because we need to heat this up to a boiling point,
to dissolve the sugar and hydrate the gums
and get them doing the gummy thing that they need to do.
So we're gonna mix, combine, bring to the boil,
and just gently simmer for three minutes,
and then we're done.
We're gonna brew about half a liter of filter coffee here.
You don't need all of it, but you only have a little tiny
shot of filter coffee left over as kind of excess.
That's a treat for you.
I'm gonna use this kind of nice Kenyan coffee again.
You don't need to the Kenyan coffee for this,
you could use anything I think
that has a little bit of kind of red fruit to it.
I think really nice Colombian coffees can do that,
great Guatemalan coffees can do that.
Lots of east African coffees can do interesting fruitiness.
That's the kind of ballpark flavor I would recommend
for this particular recipe, but we'll talk about adaptation
to different coffees in a little bit.
Recipe wise we're gonna brew it 70 grams a liter,
that little bit stronger.
I want enough coffee flavor in the ice cream
that I'm enjoying the coffeeness of it,
but not so much that I'm getting kind of caffeinated
at a time where maybe I don't want a lot of caffeine
and I'm not eating my caffeine allowance for the day.
So I figure this is a nice ratio.
You can extract it properly, it'll taste really good.
And paper filters will help reduce bitterness,
kind of particles in there, so definitely recommend
that as a kind of brew method.
Can be any paper filter though, but paper filter for sure.
If you're new to the channel and you wanna know more
about how I'm brewing this particular coffee
there's a guide to the V60,
which I'll leave a link to down below.
So as I said, 400 grams of liquid.
(liquid pouring)
And a little extra for you.
Now here, we're brewing somewhere around 1.4, 1.5% strength.
If you really wanna know about that stuff.
You could brew stronger, right?
You could use cold brew if you really wanted to
in this particular recipe, the choice is up to you.
But I'm looking for as much complexity as I can get,
even though I'm gonna lose quite a lot later,
but you know you wanna make sure
you're extracting the coffee properly
and having a balanced brew at the end of it.
So for me, 70 grams,
but you could go a little higher if you really wanted to.
Cheers.
Mm, juicy.
So now we need a blender.
Now, you don't have to have
a giant monstrosity of a blender here.
You could use a stick blender,
you could probably hand whisk this if you really wanted to,
but a blender will help make this
whole bit a little bit easier.
So, first in is our gelled syrup.
That's gonna have a slightly weird texture,
don't freak out, it's okay.
It's good news, I promise.
And then throw in not all of the coffee right now,
but a good splash.
(coffee pouring)
Now we're gonna add three things for taste reasons,
as well as a little bit of texture,
'cause ice cream ingredients have a kind of
either taste or texture or sometimes both role.
First up I'm gonna add some fat to the whole deal.
Again, inspired by that ChefSteps recipe,
I'm gonna use a little bit of cocoa butter,
just 30 grams and that's gonna increase the richness of it
without competing for the flavor too much.
It's relatively neutral, and I think a complimentary flavor.
Second ingredient is perhaps a little bit controversial.
I wanna use a tiny little bit of cocoa powder.
Now in loads of chocolate cake recipes,
they always say use like a little bit of espresso powder
or a little bit of coffee in there
to amplify the chocolatiness.
And I wondered, could you go the other way?
Could a little tiny bit of cocoa powder,
amplify the kind of chocolatiness of coffee,
when it does chocolate, if you know what I mean.
And it turns out it does.
We're gonna use two grams maximum, like a tiny amount here.
I'm using a very nice one.
If you used a sort of more aggressive,
more commercial powder,
I might reduce that a little bit more, but here two grams.
I wanted to bring back a little bit of fruitiness.
And I was trying to think of a kind of way to do that,
and I landed on maraschino cherries.
I would avoid something in kind of a liqueur,
we're going to stay sort of alcohol free.
This is just a sort of sugar syrup.
I had some of these cherries lying around,
this syrup is delicious, but we're only gonna use 10 grams.
And in the final product,
it'll be there in a very subtle way,
where you might not even notice it
if you didn't know it was there,
it just reminds you of that kind of fruitiness of coffee,
the sweet good fruitiness that great coffees have.
Quick blend.
(blender whirs)
And then we'll throw the rest to the coffee in.
Now what we're gonna do,
regardless of whether you're gonna churn it
in a sort of cheap domestic ice cream machine,
or a fancy domestic ice cream machine,
or whether you're gonna do what I'm gonna do,
which is freeze it as a solid block
and deal with that later.
You wanna cool this down as much as possible.
Don't put hot things in your freezer, not a good idea.
So we're gonna make a simple ice bath for this,
and just chill it down,
getting it ready to go into the freezer.
So this is now fully chilled down to like cold, cold, cold.
You could churn it in a normal machine,
and you'll get a great result,
not quite the texture that I'm gonna get today,
but a delicious result.
Me, I'm just gonna freeze this in this little tub
to a solid block.
Lid on.
So we're gonna put this in the freezer for 24 hours
or if you're like me and you want a little movie magic
we have a frozen one right here.
(hands clap)
Lovely.
Frozen nice and solid,
ready to be made into delicious ice cream.
(machine whirs & roars)
(James chuckles)
Let's have a little taste.
Oh, look at that texture.
Do you know, I don't really know
how to describe what this is,
because this isn't a purest expression of coffee,
because it just doesn't work
as a straight kind of coffee coffee ice cream.
But it has a lot of what I like about coffee,
and a few of those things kind of amplified a little bit.
The texture is fantastic.
That little bit of extra kind of richness
from the cocoa butter is there.
You can taste it a little bit, but it's just subtle enough.
If you're looking for it, you'll find it, and that's true of
the cocoa powder, again, subtle.
If you look for it, you'll find it
but otherwise it's just adding to this kind of overall
kind of blend of flavors that is very enjoyable.
It's still very coffee, but it's also something more.
It's just delicious.
Now the whole point of this recipe in some ways
was to kind of create a platform
in which you could play with.
Firstly, don't obsess over carrageenan
and lambda carrageenan in particular,
locust bean gum is doing most of the work here,
and you could use other thickeners if you wanted to.
There's plenty of research
on using thickeners in ice cream online.
So sub out as you will, for what you can find easily.
Secondly, with the cherry flavor in this,
it's very subtle, but very nice,
but it compliments the coffee.
But if you wanted to brew say a really wild fermentation,
or a very kind of naturally natural processed coffee,
you could use pineapple syrup if you wanted to,
or anything else just to add that little bit
of complexity back that's missing
from the very cold temperatures.
Now as I said, you could churn this
in any ice cream machine that you have.
You may not get the flawless texture that this has,
but it will still be a delicious treat.
And if you are absolutely desperate for dairy,
make a reverse affogato.
Big scoop of this, steam maybe 100 mls of milk, combine.
It's a nice time.
The flavor is super interesting,
it has become this kind of generic coffee flavor,
but this very nice version of it,
because it's got all the goodness for specialty
in that it's sweet, it doesn't have any bitterness,
or harshness there, it's got kind of no negative flavors.
It's just a very pure, classic coffee flavor in the middle.
So let me know if you make this,
let me know if you iterate on it,
leave me a comment down below,
but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.