Bacio ice cream

Bacio (a kiss in Italian) is probably the sweetest of all ice creams! Rich chocolate with smooth hazelnut praline and whole hazelnuts. Yumm. A real classic Italian gelato. Here's my home made recipe for it.

The Ingredients:

Pâte à bombe base (by Gordon Ramsay):
1 dl water
1,8 dl sugar
6 large egg yolks

Bacio ice cream:
1 portion of Pâte à bombe
2,5 dl whole milk
2,5 dl whole cream
100 g dark chocolate
100 g Nutella paste
50 g whole hazelnuts

Pâte à bombe
1. For the Pâte à bombe base, mix the sugar with the water in a thick-based kettle. Warm it up on low heat and let the sugar dissolve. Use wooden spoon to stir.
2. At the same time, put the egg yolks in a good old heavy stationary mixer (or whip with hand (electric) mixer) and work on it to achive a creamy, thick foam.
3. When the sugar has been dissolved in the kettle, turn up the heat and let it boil for about 5-7 minutes. When it's just about to start to get yellow on the sides, take it off from the stove! (Also, if you drop a small amount of this syrup into a glass of water, it should immediately form a hard transparent ball.)
4. Mix the syrup with the egg yolk foam and keep whipping! The foam should get quite thick and form soft peaks.
5. Set Pâte à bombe mixture aside and let it cool to room temperature.

Bacio Ice Cream
1. Break up the chocolate in a heat proof bowl. Add Nutella and the hazelnuts.
2. Heat up the milk and the cream in a kettle to boiling point. Pour onto the chocolate-Nutella-nuts-in-a-bowl.
3. Stir with a wooden spoon as long as it takes for the chocolate and Nutella to melt. The mixture should be smooth, only bumps being the hazelnuts.
4. Let the mixture cool off to room temperature. You can achive this quicker by placing the bowl in icy water.
5. Fold the Pâte à bombe to the chocolate mixture. Now, it is very important that these two mixtures have the same temperature when mixing together! Even if the Pâte à bombe looses a bit of its air pockets, do not be afraid: it shall be allright (at least with an ice cream maker ;-)
6. Churn the mixture in an ice cream maker for about 45 minutes (depending on the machine. Check out my review of Philips' ice cream machine). After churning the mixture should be very smooth and like soft ice. A little more freezing is required so place it into a container and into your freezer. Wait a couple of hours or overnight.
(7.) If you do not have an ice cream maker, put the mixture in a wide container (with a lid!) and stuff it in your freezer. You have to check the freezing process every hour or so and whip the mixture to break the ice crystals until the ice cream gets too hard to whip. The goal is to get smooth ice cream, not a block of ice.

The result should be really taste, chocolaty gelato with hazelnut flavour and whole nuts in it. The texture is like velvet and the ice cream melts quite quickly (think Mövenpick's chocolate ice cream)

Enjoy!