- Today we're gonna talk about espresso affogato.
That is, ice cream with a shot of espresso poured on top.
Cos I have some issues with espresso affogato.
But I'm gonna fix those issues.
Well, one of them anyway.
Because, I kind of have a beef with the name.
The espresso isn't drowning,
the ice cream is drowning.
Why is it not? gelato affogato? That's beside the point.
The real problem I have with espresso affogato,
is that it's disappointing. I'm not saying it's not good.
I'm not saying you haven't enjoyed them,
but, typically, they are less than the sum of that part.
I love ice cream. I love the espresso, but together,
it's often a little bit, .
So this led me to a journey into ice cream.
I wanted to understand why it wasn't good
and how then to make the ultimate espresso affogato.
The first thing I needed to do was make a lot of ice cream.
So, I hit up the lovely people at Sage,
and asked to borrow an ice cream machine
and they very kindly sent me one over. So thank you to them.
They're not sponsoring.
They just lent me this and sadly I have to give it back.
And I decided to answer some flavor questions.
First, I wanted to really answer two separate questions.
Is vanilla good or bad?
And then eggs. Cos eggs are a tricky thing. Right?
If you've had brunch and you had like a nice poached egg
and you cut into it, and you're eating that egg,
and then you drink some coffee,
you'll notice your coffee tastes kind of weird.
Eggs definitely mess with the taste of coffee.
But eggs are really common in ice cream.
They do wonders to kind of improve its texture
as well as its flavor in many cases.
So, I wanted to assess were eggs good or bad.
So to achieve this, I made three different ice creams.
I made a milk ice cream, A Fior di latte.
I made an egg free vanilla ice cream,
and then I made a frozen custard.
Something super heavy on the egg yolks.
So for the fior di latte,
I turned to Stella Parks aka Brave Tart
because she's just a go tooth anything sweet online
and this was a pretty simple milk forward recipe.
35 grams of cornstarch, 265 grams of sugar,
two and a half grams of salt,
225 grams of heavy or double cream.
565 grams of milk.
Now, the idea is pretty simple.
You're gonna take a portion of that cream,
and whisk it with the sugar and the cornstarch together
to create a sort of thick and hydrated cornstarch.
You have to heat the milk pretty high to do that,
which means that you would destroy
some of the flavor of that milk.
Which is why you only heat a portion
and then you add back in, fresh cream, fresh milk,
before you then jam.
The egg free vanilla ice cream
I took from my friend at Shift steps.
Because they always do a great job
with super precise recipes.
- I love ice cream.
- Point 4 grams of locust bean gum,
point four grams of xanthan gum,
point one grams of carrageenan,
we took 120 grams of sugar, 50 grams of skimmed milk powder,
450 grams of milk,
165 grams of heavy cream,
and eight grams of vanilla bean pulp which is a lot.
The technique here is pretty simple.
You combine your dry ingredients together,
you whisk it into your liquid ingredients.
This you then, back up and cook
sous vide at 95 degrees celsius for 30 minutes.
After cooking, blend it with some vanilla beans,
and then you chill it down in an ice bath,
before you then turn it into ice cream.
The frozen custard again came from ChefSteps.
It's a super simple recipe.
225 grams of sugar, 650 grams of milk,
200 grams of egg yolks, 150 grams of heavy or double cream,
45 grams of skimmed milk powder,
five grams of salt, 10 grams of vanilla extract,
here you just mix it all together,
and then you cook it sous vide at one of two temperatures.
I just cook it a little bit lower,
65 sous for an hour,
because I was more concerned about taste,
than I was about texture at this point.
Then you chill it down,
churn it into ice cream.
And so we had three different ice creams.
And this is really good place to be in your life.
We then did a taste comparison.
We took members of the team at Square Mile,
and we gave them affogatos,
and we asked them to say,
which of those three they preferred the taste of?
This wasn't about texture. It wasn't about sweetness.
This was about flavor.
Which ice cream worked the best with the coffee?
Now the results of this were super interesting,
and it did confirm some suspicions I had held.
In last place was the frozen custard.
It turns out that eggs do indeed mess a little bit
with the taste of the coffee.
It's hard to describe,
but it definitely mutes or blunt aspects
of the espressos taste in a way that no one really liked.
Now, when it came to, the other two these were both popular.
One was popular for having a lovely clean milk taste
but was a little bland.
And as it got a little bit closer
to melting that cornstarch,
gave it a kind of gummy texture.
Now the shift that's ice cream was really good but again,
not without some issues.
Eight grams of vanilla bean pulp
is not only wildly expensive to do,
but it's actually just way too much vanilla taste.
In addition, the fact that all of the dairy had been held
at a high temperature,
gave it that kind of cooked milk taste
that I don't really like.
No one should really like especially
if you spent time being a barista,
and a kind of allergic to the smell of overheated milk.
What I did like about it,
was the texture was good,
the sweetness was nearly there, it was close.
So it left me feeling that
there had to be a kind of hybrid way
I wanted that kind of milk flavor from the fior di latte.
And I wanted some vanilla but less.
You wanna feel like you're eating ice cream,
and vanilla just triggers that part of your brain that says,
"I'm eating delicious ice cream".
So I kind of created a hybrid version of the recipe.
I used the thickening agents from the Chef Dave's Recipe,
but I took the technique from Stella.
So, I took a portion of the milk and the cream,
and I heated it up with the sugar
and the gums joining agents.
You want to take it up to the point,
where it's just about boiling and hold it there,
until you see it thicken and you'll see a textural change.
And then I would cool that down,
whip in the milk powder,
that's quite hard work to get it to dissolve
but I didn't wanna cook it,
and then the fresh milk and cream.
And then I added the vanilla.
I added a small amount of pulp
about one vanilla beans worth,
it's about a gram, and then
about five grams of vanilla bean paste.
Now when you turn this all up,
you end up with an ice cream that goes
so well with espresso.
But it didn't mean we were done with testing.
So if you want the full ice cream recipe
with all the measurements and the step by steps,
well, I created a page on my website,
a website that I built,
thanks to the sponsor of today's video,
which is Squarespace.
I love building websites with Squarespace
because it's so quick and it's so easy.
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They've got a huge range of templates to choose from
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So, so quickly. Beyond that,
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It's stress free, it's worry free.
And if you want a website or a domain,
you can use my link in the description down below.
It'll give you a discount code, for 10% off
your purchase with Squarespace.
Thanks to them for sponsoring this video.
Let's get back to the ice cream.
One other things we wanted to test
was the right ratio between ice cream and espresso.
Now, this is presuming you're doing a smart thing,
which is making sure that your cups are freezing cold.
Essential to make this all work.
And then testing about 50 grams of ice cream
worked really beautifully with a single shot of espresso.
There was one more thing
that I really wanted to look at though.
When you add your espresso.
Should that espresso be hot?
Or should it be cooled, chilled, cold? We run some tests.
It turns out that the best result
come from pulling a shot, hot onto the ice cream directly.
Now, the ice cream and the cup itself
chill out espresso very quickly.
But there is just enough, melting of ice cream
that, that espresso gets diluted by sweet
creamy delicious ice cream,
and the first bite to the last until you're scraping out,
every last drop from the bottom of that cup.
It's all delicious.
If you really wanna mess with your espresso,
I would, perhaps on the side of a more ristretto shot,
than more of a longer shot.
Chilling it down will enhance
any mild bitterness in the short,
whereas that little bit of sugar will mitigate
any slight imbalance in acidity.
So you can go just a little bit shorter
on your shots if you want to.
I mean, I still want a two to one ratio in my espresso.
I just want the espresso to taste as good as it can.
But if you wanna play it, that's how you can play.
So, cheers.
That is very good. That is, coffee first.
And then there's nice little pulp of vanilla.
It's not like a dominant vanilla node.
But it finishes, is really Kind of milky lovely finish
which, you need good milk.
Like there's no point during this recipe,
if you're not using a really good milk.
But, if you're making coffee,
you should be using really good milk anyway.
So, shout out to Northiam Dairy,
Dan and Kent, they do a great job.
That coffee is just, a little bit sweet,
a little bit creamy.
The cold cup definitely helps bring
the temperature down without melting too much ice cream.
That's really good. That's really good.
You should try this. You really should try this.
This is very good.
Should we put this on a Proof Rock?
Leave a comment down below if you think we should do that.
We will do that.
Maybe, it'll be available on the streets of London.
I hope you try this. If you do,
give me a feedback down below.
I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for watching.
Have a great day.
It's not
oh no!