Saw a recipe online for a double dark chocolate ice cream. It called for 1 c milk, 2 c whipping cream, 1/2 c dark cocoa and 10 oz dark chocolate, among other ingredients. Sounded to me like a brick so I decided to approximate @paulraphael's very well thought out chocolate ice cream. I had to make a lot of ingredient substitutions so it's probably better to say that I've used his method rather than his recipe.
For ~ a pint sized batch, I used:
235g whole milk
35g Cacao Barry Extra Brute cocoa powder (instead of the excellent quality cocoa specified)
52g sugar (replacing the recipe's mix of dextrose & fructose which would have much better freezing point depression)
0.6g salt
3/4t Avacream (replacing a blend of locust bean gum, guar gum and carrageenan)
45g Trader Joe's 72% cacao dark chocolate (replacing the high quality bittersweet chocolate specified)
120g heavy cream
5g vanilla
I omitted the soy lecithin in the recipe as I don't have it. Considered trying to add some egg white but decided to just skip it.
I followed his method, scraping the mix into 2 Ninja Creami containers (~ 1/2 pint each) and freezing overnight. One container got a tablespoon of Chartreuse mixed in before freezing.
The straight chocolate was likely too hard due to my sugar subs and maybe the stabilizers, too. It looked very powdery after the first spin on the ice cream cycle. Even after a re-spin, this is what it looked like:
The one with added Chartreuse was perfect. I elected to thaw the straight chocolate mix, stir in a tablespoon of the unsweetened "creme de cacao" that I'd made by infusing cacao nibs in vodka for several weeks (or months? can't remember), then refreeze and respin. It came out perfectly. I think the cacao nib alcohol rounded out the flavor as well as lowering the freezing point.
This was just what I wanted. Dark chocolate flavor, kind of like a rich ganache that melts almost instantly in your mouth.
The Chartreuse version was also very good, although in a side-by side taste test, I preferred the straight chocolate with a small glass of Chartreuse to sip in between bites!
I'll make this again.
