Ice Cream Recipe Review: Rose Levi Beranbaum's Chocolate Ice Cream

"Chocolate Ice Cream" from Rose's Ice Cream Bliss by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

• The online recipe can be found here. 
• My other Chocolate ice cream reviews can be found here.

This is an unusual recipe in that it includes a little malted milk powder and a tiny bit of instant espresso powder (1/16 tsp for the whole recipe). It's not as deeply chocolate as I prefer, but it's really quite delicious, perhaps the best "regular" chocolate ice cream I've ever made.

It was a little hard getting all the cocoa dissolved, so next time, I think I'd put the salt, espresso powder, sugar, malt powder, and cocoa in the saucepan first and stir it together well, then add the yolks, liquid sugar, milk, and the first part of cream on top of that.  Whisk, then turn on the heat.

Creating the custard went really fast because I set my pan on the scale and used the gram measures from Rose's book, hitting tare between each ingredient.  I also cooked the custard in the pan (as the recipe directs) instead of the double boiler, and it seemed fine.  Once chilled, it was quite thick, but still pourable. 

Substitutions and Techniques:

• Turbinado sugar instead of white sugar (always) as I prefer the flavor.
• Tapioca syrup instead of glucose.
• Nielsen Massey vanilla extract.
• Lake Champlain Unsweetened Organic Cocoa - this really is one of the best ones - excellent flavor and it's finely ground enough that it easily goes into solution with little effort, without imparting a powdery taste.

Results:

• Same day: Wonderfully smooth texture, nice milder chocolate flavor.
• Next day: Smooth, nice texture, slightly less scoopable than I'd like.

Uses:

• I stirred in about 1.5 ounces of crispy toasted sweetened coconut chips/flakes and while the coconut chips are a nice texture element, they are quite delicate, and the flavor gets a little lost against the chocolate.  I think chunks of coconut macaroons (Mounds candy bars?) would be better, or maybe toasted shredded coconut - anything to make the coconut element bigger, and a little more forward.  
• I also stirred in 1/4 cup of toasted slivered almonds because that's all I had on hand.  The toasted almonds held their own nicely against the backdrop of the chocolate, but I think it needed double the amount I used.