Laduree Sucre Recipe: Dark Chocolate Ice Cream

I’m on a mission to make as many recipes out of my laduree sucre cookbook as possible, but this is difficult because many of the recipes involve obscure and/or expensive ingredients (I’m looking at you almond paste, candied walnuts, almond flour and my recently purchased orange blossom water) in addition to expensive equipment. One of these equipment boundaries was broken when I found out my uncle had a barely used ice cream machine he would let me borrow. I decided to make the recipe it thought most people in my family would eat: Dark Chocolate.

The recipe is as follows:

Glace au Chocolate Noir (makes 2 pints or 1 liter)

7 oz/ 200 g chocolate (the recipe recommends 70% at least, I used 60% and it turned out to be a bit too dark for some of my family)

½ c +1 T / 100 ml water

2 c. + 2 T / 500 ml whole milk

3 egg yolks

½ c + 2 T / 120 g sugar

1.       Chop the chocolate (or measure out your chocolate chips like myself) and set aside.  In a saucepan, bring water and milk to a boil; remove from heat.

2.       In a large bowl, mix together your egg yolks and sugar. Add a third of the milk over the yolks and mix to temper then pour mixture into saucepan.

3.       Cook this over low heat until your custard comes together; it should coat the back of a spoon and when a finger in run though it, it shouldn’t bleed back. It should never boil.

*Note: I never know when to stop cooking a custard. I cooked this for like 15-20 minutes until I saw bits of egg starting to cook and at that point took it off the heat immediately.

4. At this point the recipe says remove from heat, and add chocolate, but instead I like to clean out the mixing bowl that had the egg and sugar mixture, but the chocolate in there and pour the custard through a fine seize to catch any cooked egg or scalded milk on top.  Then, mix this together. The recipe recommends stirring for 5 minutes.  Cool the mixture ( I waited 2 hours) and freeze to your machine’s directions.

The book recommends letting the ice cream sit in an airtight container in the freezer for three hours after mixing in the ice cream maker to cure and freeze.

This recipe was not that complicated and didn’t involve too many ingredients or expensive ones. For me, the milk and chocolate (the only “special ingredients I had to buy) only cost about 3 dollars together.

I found this ice cream to be very tasty and rich; some of my family said I was “too chocolately” and “too dark/bitter”; I’d image this recipe would work the same with milk chocolate.  As a note, I was impatient and tasted it less than an hour after mixing and it tasted a bit like cocoa powder, the next day it didn’t have that taste.

Overall, this recipe was successful even though I can’t make a custard to save my life. I can see myself making this again in the future (maybe with milk chocolate).