After the “reverse engineering” of snickers ice cream, let’s move on to another italian classic to remake at home: “croccantino” ice cream, a vanilla ice cream, variegated with black cherry and topped with a layer of dark chocolate and roasted hazelnuts. An icon of the 80s-90s! Today I show you how to prepare it at home by balancing it correctly!
This recipe can also be found, along with an avalanche of other recipes, in the Gelato Project, my “living” ebook based on user feedback, also available in english
The following infographic shows how the Gelato Project works.
Like all ice cream on a stick, it is always a bit laborious to prepare it in your own kitchen, but you are repaid for the work at the first bite 🙂 If you are in possession of a blast chiller, it comes in very handy for this type of preparation.
Recipe
Vanilla ice cream
- 439.4 g of Whole Milk
- 131.4 g of cream (35% fats)
- 30.1 g of Skim Milk Powder
- 2.6 g of Neutral (Locust bean gum + guar gum)
- 105.1 g Sucrose
- 37.5 g of Dextrose
- 3.7 g vanilla bean
Chocolate coating
- 200 g dark chocolate
- 40 g sunflower seed oil
Hazelnut brittle
- 50 g of hazelnuts
- 20 g of sugar
Black cherry variegation
To make it at home, I refer you to the full recipe find in the ice cream project. You can use a commercial cherry or black cherry jam for this recipe.
Steps
Prepare the hazelnut brittle by chopping the hazelnuts and caramelizing them in a pan with sugar for a few minutes, then set aside.
Place the black cherry jam (or the variegate if you made it at home following the project ice cream recipe) in a sac à poche (previously whipping it if it has whole pieces of fruit).
Combine the powders (milk powder, sugars, neutral), keeping some sugar aside.
Heat the milk with the sugar kept aside (will prevent the milk from incorporating too much air).
Add the cream to approx. 30°C, then extract the vanilla from the pod and add it.
Add powders, when cream and milk reach approx. 40°C.
Without stopping stirring, pasteurize by bringing the mixture to 85°C for a couple of minutes.
Ripen the mixture in the refrigerator for 6 to 12 hours, then freeze in an ice cream maker.
Place the ice cream into the silicone mini ice cream molds, filling them about 50% full.
Add the black cherry variegate and chill (or put the ice creams in the freezer for a couple of hours), while the rest of the ice cream you can keep in the freezer in a tupperware waiting to finish filling the mold.
Complete filling the mold with the remaining ice cream and blast chilling (or leave in the freezer for 6 to 8 hours until the gelatos are well solidified).
Prepare the ice cream topping by heating the chopped chocolate in a bain-marie and stirring well until glossy. Remove from the heat and insert the seed oil in a trickle, emulsifying well with a whisk. Allow to cool to 35-38°C, and then start with the covering.
Prepare the chocolate in a narrow, tall glass (at least as tall as the gelatos) and the crisp in a bowl. Also prepare a cold plate (left in the freezer 30 minutes) for placing the freshly covered gelati on.
Dip the ice creams one by one and then immediately add the crisp to adhere. Place the coated ice cream on the frozen plate and move on to the next one.
Store in the freezer until consumed 🙂
Chocolate goes downhill fast. If you find yourself with little chocolate and lots of black cherry, here is an alternative version of this ice cream, where you can put everything on top of the gelatos as you feel 😉
An avalanche of other recipes in the Gelato Project
Download the gelato project to get this and an avalanche of other recipes, constantly increasing being a “living book”. This specific recipe is available from version 1.3.
For a few little bonuses enter my telegram channel (in italian), where I occasionally leave some exclusive little giveaways for subscribers to my privileged channel (in which you will be together with a small group of followers that I always treat with kid gloves, dispensing preview updates but also exclusive content).
- Dark beer ice cream, popcorn & caramel - 8 September 2023
- Homemade “croccantino” ice cream - 1 September 2023
- Snickers ice cream reverse engineering - 8 August 2023
