“They were all melting….” “It’s good.” “Spared no expense.”

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me! Today we’re going to make the long-anticipated caramel ice cream. This is a very simple recipe. I developed this, actually, for my food science class, but it turns out to be a great ice cream. It has very few ingredients and is really easy to make, so I just wanted to share with you today.

So, all that we need for this recipe is 100g of water, 165g of sugar, six egg yolks, and then this is actually a combination of 510g of 36% cream and 170g of 4% milk (or regular whole milk).

I didn’t include vanilla in this recipe because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, but it will add a little depth of flavor. If you want to put it in, you can use either a teaspoon of vanilla extract or you can split and scrape an entire vanilla bean, put it in when you’re cooking the custard, and it will get strained out in the last step.
So, the first thing we’re going to do is crack our eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. We want to do this when the eggs are really cold right out of the fridge. If you let them warm, up the yolks tend to break a lot more easily.

The first thing that we’re going to do is caramelize the sugar. We’re going to get it to the exact color that we’re after.

(I have a whole video I’ve already done about cooking sugar, so if you haven’t watched that already, you might want to check it out before you do this.)

And then as soon as it’s to the exact color that we want, we’re going to deglaze it with our milk and cream mixture. We’re going to stir that until the caramel completely dissolves into the milk and cream; and then once that’s done, it will be at a perfect temperature for us to finish the rest of the recipe — which is, we’re going to put in our egg yolks, we’re going to get those nicely whisked until it’s even, and then we’re going to cook that to just a little above 180°F. And that’s it! Very easy. As soon as it’s done, you can either put it directly into an ice cream machine (if you have one like the Breville or like the Musso that I showed in the last video which have a compressor built in, so these ones you can put hot custard in immediately and it will take — this particular machine takes a little over an hour to cool it. The Musso only takes 20 to 30 minutes.

Or, you can put this into a container, cool it down, and then put in the fridge for anywhere between 4 and 8 hours that’s called “aging,” and it will crystallize some of the fats in there, so it gives a slightly different texture which some people prefer.

Honestly, the difference in texture is very subtle, so if you’re in a hurry for ice cream, I wouldn’t even worry about doing that. But if you want to try to make the best possible creaminess of the ice cream then you may want to age it (like I said, for about 4 to 8 hours). So, that’s it; let’s get started.

Now I’m going to take my water and put it into the pot, and I’m going to put my sugar into the middle of the pot, making sure that I don’t have any sugar crystals around the edges, because that can cause crystallization. And then I’ll use the patented Chef Michael poking system just to wet the sugar so that it dissolves a little bit more easily.

I want to take a minute while the sugar is caramelizing to talk about how table sugar which is called sucrose is constructed and broken apart. To start, let’s talk about the most common sugars in food and biology starting with glucose. Glucose, either by itself or is part of a larger molecule, is the single most abundant organic molecule in nature. For example, glucose molecules make up starch, cellulose, and chiten. It’s also the primary molecule that our bodies use to produce energy. Fructose, meaning “fruit sugar” is also very common and very important. And last is galactose, which means “milk sugar.” Pectin, which thickens fruit pies and jams is made from galactose.

If two glucose molecules bond together to form a larger molecule, it’s called “maltose” — the sugar that’s prominent in malt, among other things.

Lactose which also means “milk sugar” (but this time from Latin roots instead of Greek) is, not surprisingly, the sugar found in milk.

And finally, glucose bonded to fructose gives us sucrose — common table sugar. When two monosaccharides (or single-unit sugars) bond together there are three extra atoms that are not needed: two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. These bond together to form a water molecule. And for those of you who want extra credit, the bond between two monosaccharides is called a “glycosidic bond” and the reaction is called a “condensation reaction.”

Sucrose can be broken back down into glucose and fructose, but it requires a water molecule to do so, to provide the extra atoms that were lost during the condensation reaction.

This is a crucial point here, because without this water glucose and fructose can’t reform. Incidentally, when sucrose is broken down into fructose and glucose it’s called “invert sugar,” and if you look at the list of ingredients on a candy bar, you’re likely to see invert sugar listed. So, now you know what it is.

Now I want to talk for a minute about two types of caramelization. There’s “wet caramelization,” done with water (like what we’re doing today) and “dry caramelization” where sucrose is put into a pan with no water and melted and then caramelized.

Many chefs prefer one method over the other, but few people understand that the products produced by these two methods is going to taste different. During both types of caramelization, a lot of the sugar is broken into a variety of small molecules, and some of these molecules bond together to form even more molecules.

All together, hundreds of new different molecules are formed, and all of these new molecules account for the complex aromas and the color of caramel. In wet caramelization, fructose and glucose are also formed through hydrolysis (which means the splitting of a molecule using water).

On this slide you can see the relative sweetness levels of different sugars. These numbers are approximate, and some sources have different values, but you can see that fructose is much sweeter than any other sugar. What’s interesting about this is that if you split sucrose into fructose and glucose, the resulting mixture invert sugar is sweeter than what you started with even though it has the same number of calories. This is one of the reasons that manufacturers use invert sugar. High fructose corn syrup and honey both have very large amounts of invert sugar in them.

Fructose, glucose, sucrose, and other sugars have many different properties from each other, like how easily they crystallize, how well they bind water, and other factors that have a significant impact on food and cooking.

This is why some recipes call for specific types of sugars and why, for example, some of my ice cream recipes call for both table sugar and corn syrup, which is a mixture of different sugars (predominantly glucose).

Okay, so now back to our caramelizing sugar. Note that I never stir the sugar since that can cause crystallization, which will ruin the caramel. We want to cook the sugar to a pretty dark color. This is somewhat up to your personal preference, but the darker you cook the sugar, the more flavorful it will be.

It will also be more bitter as it gets darker, so if you want the ice cream a little sweeter with less taste of caramel, cook your sugar a little bit lighter. And if you want a more intense ice cream, cook it on the darker side. Just be careful not to go too far, where the ice cream can get very bitter.

At this point you’re going to deglaze your caramel with your milk and cream mixture, and you want to start stirring as soon as you pour it in so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom. If that happens, you can just turn the heat on for about a minute and just loosen it up from the bottom, and then it’ll be fine.

And then at this point, just keep stirring. It’ll take about 10 to 15 minutes to fully dissolve all the caramel, and during that time your mixture will also be cooling down, and it’ll end up somewhere usually between 100 and 110°F, which is perfect for the next step.

“I know that’s the same thing that I told her.”

Okay; at this point our caramel is completely dissolved, and we’re going to drop in our egg yolks break them up with our whisk and start getting them mixed in. We don’t have to completely mix them in at this point because the next step is to cook the mixture to just over 180°F while stirring fairly constantly with the silicone spatula. By the time the custard is cooked, the mixture will be extremely smooth. While you’re stirring, scrape the bottom and the sides of the pot so that none of the custard sticks and overcooks.

You’ll see the mixture visibly thicken when it gets to around 180° Fahrenheit, and as soon as it’s done, turn off the heat and give it a few more stirs and then strain it, either into the ice cream machine or into a container to cool if you’re using an ice cream machine that doesn’t have a cooling function.

If that’s the case, you want to leave the custard in the fridge for several hours or overnight to completely cool.

All right; and it’s done! It took a little bit longer than it normally does because I took the lid off so that you could see it on the video a little bit better, but it looks great, and I’m going to take it out and give it a little taste.

So, it’s super creamy. If you like it a little bit firmer than this, just put it in the freezer and you know for an hour to three hours, depending on how firm you want it. Super yummy. It’s really creamy; it’s got a great caramel taste. I didn’t use any vanilla in it to make the recipe a little simpler. Normally I would, because I think it gives it a little bit extra depth of flavor, but it has so much flavor without it, if you don’t have vanilla and don’t want to mess with that, perfectly fine.

If you make it, please let me know in the comments below, and let me know how you like it.