Liquor/liqueurs in ice cream

[Darienne]

Two days ago I made Helado de Pasitas con Tequila / Tequila-Raisin Ice Cream from Fany Gerson's My Sweet Mexico.

Alcohol doesn't freeze well and you can put a tablespoon or so into your ice cream base to make sure it doesn't get too hard. But this recipe calls for 3/4 of a cup!!!!

It's sitting in our very cold (dog food) freezer and it's still pretty soft. Edible, but very soft. I can't imagine that one quart of ice cream can include that much booze and be hard enough to satisfy. Did I mention that it's pretty darned tasty???

I can't figure out what Gerson could have done to make this into a more conventional ice cream in terms of firmness. She says nothing about the ice cream being soft or hard.

Any useful thoughts?

[pastrygirl]

If you're going to add significant alcohol, you need to reduce the sugar or add solids to get the same frozen consistency. In my experience, chocolate ice creams are good with extra alcohol to balance out the added firmness from the chocolate. Otherwise, I don't normally add more than a few tablespoons of liquor to a gallon of custard base.

[paulraphael]

What pastrygirl said. If I'm making a flavor with a lot of alcohol, I'll reduce the sugar, especially any sugars with greater freezing point suppression, like glucose and trimoline. Upping the nonfat solids (powdered milk, etc.) helps.

Still, more than an ounce or so per quart of ice cream is a lot. If I need more booze flavor than this will give, then I'll divide it and flame / boil off most of the alcohol from a portion of it. So for instance, I'll take 2 or 3 oz of booze, divide in half, and flame one half on the stove, letting it simmer until it goes out. This removes about 75% of the alcohol. It removes a lot of flavor, too, but some of the flavors will actually get more concentrated.

[Darienne]

Thanks Paul and Pastry Girl for your comments. Of course I agree with both of you on the subject and just wondered what could have been Mz Gerson's thinking. She does have a website, so I'll write to her.

In the meantime, as noted before, the ice cream is delicious, full of booze...what's not to like? I'm not serving it to the public, so we'll just eat it with joy! And Helado de Cajeta for those under 21 and Empanadas de Jitomate for all.

Thanks.

[dougal]

Since its the alcohol in the spirit that depresses the freezing point, you could briefly boil (or even flambé) the spirit to get the flavour with less slushiness.

For smoothness, I routinely add a shot glass of Vodka (50cc?) to a batch of churning ice cream (ending up as about a litre).

No point in boiling down that Vodka ...

[Darienne]

Since its the alcohol in the spirit that depresses the freezing point, you could briefly boil (or even flambé) the spirit to get the flavour with less slushiness.

For smoothness, I routinely add a shot glass of Vodka (50cc?) to a batch of churning ice cream (ending up as about a litre).

No point in boiling down that Vodka ...

Thanks, Dougal. The ice cream is at least not slushy, just soft. I haven't taken a bowl out to see how quickly it might become 'slush'. On Saturday, I'll simply tell our guests to eat it quickly. I currently have no plans to experiment any further with the ice cream really. It was a one shot deal to see how it worked. We'll drink the tequila from now on in slushy Martgueritas.

[paulraphael]

I just looked at a boozy ice cream I've made a few versions of; the method is a little different than what I described. It's for cognac-vanilla. Cognac doesn't have a very assertive flavor in ice cream, so I found I had to use a lot of it. Here's what I did:

-for a quart of ice cream, take 4oz of cognac, bring to a simmer in a saucepan, flame, and take off heat. After the flame goes out, cool it, and add to the ice cream base.

-dd 1 to 3 TB of uncooked cognac, to get the flavor and bite right. Do this to taste ... it's a bit of a guessing game, because the simmering and flaming doesn't do a very consistent job of removing alcohol. (Be sure to use a clean spon every time you taste. Ice cream is mix is a ripe environment for bacteria).

I'm not 100% happy with this flavor, but it managed to get a decent amount of cognac into the ice cream without texture problems.