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!
Näytetään tekstit, joissa on tunniste ice cream. Näytä kaikki tekstit
Näytetään tekstit, joissa on tunniste ice cream. Näytä kaikki tekstit
torstai 14. elokuuta 2008
tiistai 12. elokuuta 2008
Philips HR 2304 ice cream maker - a review
Since I returned from Australia I've been longing for good home made ice cream. In Melbourne I worked as an ice cream salesperson under Ottorino Pace's command in his family-run-business Casa Del Gelato selling real home made Italian gelato. While Ottorino was being a crazy lil' fuck having immigrated from Sicily and now, at the age of 70, still flirting to female customers, he made pretty much the best ice cream I have ever tasted. It was truly inspiring. 48 flavours on display and some bonus stuff in the huge freezer you could stash one small sized mafia family into..
An ice cream machine of your own is great not just to produce your own superior-quality chocolate dreams but also to make light, smooth sorbets or ice creams containing, say, coconut milk instead of cream. People on low carb diet seem to find home made ice cream a good addition to their silly diet.
This summer I bought Philips' HR2304 for producing my own ice cream. It seems that all the easily-available (read: at Stockmann or Gigantti) machines fall in the same price range, 60-80 EUR. HR 2304 costed like 65 EUR at Stockmann. I would've wanted to get one with a big, removable bucket you could actually put into a freezer, but those kind of machines seem to cost at least a couple of hundred euros (on the internet).
picture: Philips
The basic idea of ice cream machine is to chill out the mixture while churning it at the same time. Churning the stuff while it freezes breaks up the ice crystals thus producing the fine texture of ice cream. The machines at this price range don't actually use electricity to cool off the mixture, but just to churn it. The freezing effect is achieved by ice bricks (kylmäkalle). In HR2304 there is a round-shaped ice brick which you freeze in your freezer and then place it on the bottom of the bowl/machine. Then you put on the lid, which has the motor and the turning spatulas in it, turn the machine on (before applying the ice cream mixture, since you don't want it to freeze stuck in the bowl) and apply the mixture from a hole in the lid. Simple and effective. The machine needs to operate 40-60 minutes depending on the mixture.
When purchasing the ice cream machine, my biggest question was if this machine could really chill the mixture enough with just an ice brick. The answer is, sadly, no. But wait! There's a solution! While you can only achieve the texture of soft ice (pehmis) with the machine, it is enough for further treatment in your actual freezer. You simply pour out the porridge-looking ice cream mixture into a container and freeze that. No more churning is needed during the freezing, contrary to not using a machine at all (when you have to churn the mixture manually every 1h of freezing or so to break the crystals). This after-freezing takes a couple of hours, but I usually enjoy my gelato the next day.
HR2304's bucket size is about one liter and the bowl is pretty tough and looks durable. The spatulas are probably the weakest part being only plastic, but following the instructions and not abusing the machine will probably ensure their long life as well.
I find Philips HR2304 good value for money. The package also includes a quite comprehensive recipe booklet.
Coming up next: make your own Bacio Gelato!
An ice cream machine of your own is great not just to produce your own superior-quality chocolate dreams but also to make light, smooth sorbets or ice creams containing, say, coconut milk instead of cream. People on low carb diet seem to find home made ice cream a good addition to their silly diet.
This summer I bought Philips' HR2304 for producing my own ice cream. It seems that all the easily-available (read: at Stockmann or Gigantti) machines fall in the same price range, 60-80 EUR. HR 2304 costed like 65 EUR at Stockmann. I would've wanted to get one with a big, removable bucket you could actually put into a freezer, but those kind of machines seem to cost at least a couple of hundred euros (on the internet).
picture: Philips
The basic idea of ice cream machine is to chill out the mixture while churning it at the same time. Churning the stuff while it freezes breaks up the ice crystals thus producing the fine texture of ice cream. The machines at this price range don't actually use electricity to cool off the mixture, but just to churn it. The freezing effect is achieved by ice bricks (kylmäkalle). In HR2304 there is a round-shaped ice brick which you freeze in your freezer and then place it on the bottom of the bowl/machine. Then you put on the lid, which has the motor and the turning spatulas in it, turn the machine on (before applying the ice cream mixture, since you don't want it to freeze stuck in the bowl) and apply the mixture from a hole in the lid. Simple and effective. The machine needs to operate 40-60 minutes depending on the mixture.
When purchasing the ice cream machine, my biggest question was if this machine could really chill the mixture enough with just an ice brick. The answer is, sadly, no. But wait! There's a solution! While you can only achieve the texture of soft ice (pehmis) with the machine, it is enough for further treatment in your actual freezer. You simply pour out the porridge-looking ice cream mixture into a container and freeze that. No more churning is needed during the freezing, contrary to not using a machine at all (when you have to churn the mixture manually every 1h of freezing or so to break the crystals). This after-freezing takes a couple of hours, but I usually enjoy my gelato the next day.
HR2304's bucket size is about one liter and the bowl is pretty tough and looks durable. The spatulas are probably the weakest part being only plastic, but following the instructions and not abusing the machine will probably ensure their long life as well.
I find Philips HR2304 good value for money. The package also includes a quite comprehensive recipe booklet.
Coming up next: make your own Bacio Gelato!
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