Vanilla’s good, but Chocolate is the best!

Hello hello hello! I hope your week as been going well so far! Surprisingly, it’s been getting warmer here at college, so it feels more like autumn than winter. I enjoy not freezing to death, but I also love watching the snowfall and seeing everything a pristine white. Hopefully soon I’ll see some snow up here! But I digress; everyone is in the mood for ice cream when it’s cold (or at least I always am!), and since I did vanilla a week or so ago, today is chocolate! The process is basically the same as vanilla, the only differences being the ingredients.

Ingredients

·      2 cups heavy cream

·      1.5 cups whole milk

·      7 large egg yolks or 3-4 eggs (somewhere between if you want to use whole eggs)

·      ¾ cup sugar

·      ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

·      ¼ tsp salt

·      7 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped (Valrhona is a good choice for this)

·      2 tsp vanilla extract

In a heavy saucepan, combine the heavy cream and whole milk. Warm over medium-high heat until mixture barely comes to a simmer. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, sugar, cocoa powder, and salt vigorously until the mixture lightens in color and doubles in volume. Remove the cream mixture from the heat and whisk it continuously into the egg mixture until smooth. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan, whisk constantly over medium heat, add the chopped chocolate and vanilla extract, and stir until the mixture forms a custard think enough to coat the back of a spoon. Do NOT let it boil. Set up an ice bath in a large bowl and place the custard in a slightly smaller large bowl once it’s run through a fine-mesh sieve. Discard the vanilla bean and stir the custard occasionally until it cools down. Remove the bowl from the ice, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until very cold, roughly 4 hours or up to 3 days. Pour the custard into an ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Spoon the ice cream into a freezer-safe container, cover tightly, and freeze until firm, at least 2 hours or up to 4 days.

And there you have it! The process is very similar to the vanilla ice cream, right? But this ice cream turns out rich, thick, and absolutely divine! So crack out the materials and make yourself some lovely chocolate ice cream!