Miso caramel ice cream

Dark caramel rounded out with white miso and a splash of soy sauce. The salt arrives fermented — deeper and longer than salt on its own.

Salted caramel is a classic by now; miso caramel is its older sibling. White miso is a fermented rice-and-soy paste that brings not only salt but also sugars from the rice koji and plenty of glutamate — so the flavour does not stop when the ice cream melts, it keeps going. The soy sauce is only ten grams: its job is not to be noticed but to give the caramel a dark, roasted floor.

Type: Classic cream ice cream · Servings: 8 · Difficulty: Challenging

Equipment

Ingredients

  • 140 g granulated sugar (sucrose) (for the caramel)
  • 300 g whipping cream 33 % (warmed, for deglazing the caramel)
  • 400 g whole milk 3.5 %
  • 25 g skimmed milk powder
  • 30 g dextrose (glucose powder)
  • 12 g cornflour (cornstarch)
  • 35 g white miso (shiro) (shiro miso, sweet and pale)
  • 10 g soy sauce (shoyu)

Making the mix

  1. Warm the cream in a small pan — cold cream would set the caramel hard on contact.
  2. Spread the granulated sugar in a thin layer in a heavy-based pan and melt it over a medium heat. Do not stir; just tilt the pan. When the caramel is dark amber and starts to smell bitter, it is ready.
  3. Take the pan off the heat and pour in the hot cream a little at a time, stirring constantly. The mixture will bubble and spit violently — use a long wooden spoon and keep your hands clear. If the caramel seizes, return the pan to a low heat and stir until it dissolves again.
  4. Pour in the milk, add the milk powder and dextrose, and whisk until smooth.
  5. Slake the cornflour (cornstarch) in two tablespoons of cold milk taken from the mix, then stir it back in. Heat to 85 °C and hold for 1–2 minutes, stirring, until the mix thickens slightly.
  6. Take the pan off the heat. Whisk the miso and soy sauce smooth in a ladleful of the hot mix (miso added straight to the pan would stay lumpy) and return it to the pan.
  7. Stand the pan in iced water and cool the mix below 5 °C. Cover and age in the fridge for 4–12 hours.

Method — Compressor ice cream maker

  1. Switch the ice cream maker on 5–10 minutes in advance so the bowl can pre-chill.
  2. Give the aged mix a quick blitz with a stick blender and pour it into the bowl, no higher than the fill line. Churn for 30–40 minutes, until it thickens and clings to the paddle.
  3. Transfer to a chilled tub, press cling film onto the surface and leave to harden in the freezer for 2 hours.

Total time: 8 h 45 min

Method — Freezer-bowl ice cream maker

  1. Take the bowl, frozen for at least 24 hours, out of the freezer just before use, fit the paddle and switch the machine on.
  2. With the machine running, pour in the well-chilled, freshly blended mix — filling the bowl no more than two-thirds.
  3. Churn for 20–30 minutes, until the mix thickens to a soft cream. There is no point going longer — by then the bowl has warmed up.
  4. Transfer to a chilled tub, cover with cling film and leave to harden in the freezer for 3 hours.

A freezer bowl only partly freezes the mix, so the ice cream takes longer to harden and tends to be slightly less smooth than from a compressor machine. A thoroughly chilled, properly aged mix helps.

Total time: 9 h 35 min

Method — Ninja CREAMi and similar machines

  1. Pour the chilled mix into a CREAMi tub up to the MAX line, put the lid on and freeze it level for 24 hours.
  2. Put the tub in the machine and run the Ice Cream program.
  3. If the result is crumbly, add a tablespoon of milk and run Re-spin.

Programme: Ice Cream

Total time: 30 h 15 min

Stages

Preparation
20 min
Cooking
20 min
Cooling
30 min
Ageing in the fridge
5 h
Churning
35 min
Hardening in the freezer
2 h
Total time
8 h 45 min

Plan: what to do and when

The whole recipe takes 8 h 45 min, of which 40 min is hands-on — the rest is waiting you can spend elsewhere.

The day before (6 h 10 min)

  • Prepare the mix (weigh and stir the ingredients) — 20 min
  • Cook the mix — 20 min
  • Cool the mix down — 30 min
  • Let the mix age in the fridge — 5 h

On the day of serving (2 h 35 min)

  • Churn in the machine — 35 min
  • Let it harden in the freezer — 2 h

Serving and storage

It works best against something roasted or sharp: apple pie, baked peaches, toasted almonds, or simply a spoonful of dark chocolate sauce. Let it stand for 5–10 minutes out of the freezer (−18 °C) until it scoops easily.

In a sealed tub with cling film pressed onto the surface it is best within a week; after that ice crystals build up.

Tips

  • The miso must be white (shiro). Dark miso is far saltier and stronger and will flatten the ice cream.
  • You can leave the soy sauce out — the recipe works without it and is then gluten-free. The flavour is a little flatter.
  • Cook the caramel to dark amber. Pale caramel is only sweet; dark caramel brings the bitter edge the miso needs.

Why it works

Miso and soy sauce are mainly salt carriers here: 35 g of miso brings about 2.1 g of salt and 10 g of soy sauce another 1.4 g. In the composition model salt has almost six times the anti-freezing power of sugar, so those three and a half grams lift the PAC by roughly 2 points — which is why this recipe needs less dextrose than a plain caramel one. The calculation also treats the caramel sugar as intact sucrose; caramelisation breaks some of it down, so the finished ice cream is a little less sweet than the POD figure suggests.

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  • Black sesame ice cream

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How we calculate the composition · What PAC and POD mean · Balance this mix in the calculator

Sources