Why was the caramel ice cream so soft? On Saturday, it took 40 minutes in the ice cream machine to get to slushy, and after an afternoon in the freezer it never froze beyond soft serve texture. Even days later, the last remaining bites refused to truly freeze.
This is the complete opposite of my usual problem of homemade ice cream or sorbet that freezes rock hard in a single day -- I add a couple of tablespoons of liquor to the mix to counteract that effect. Now I wanted to know what was keeping this glorious caramel ice cream from freezing as hard as I wanted it, for the perfect medium of solid but scoopable.
I turned to Harold McGee and his magnificent opus, On Food and Cooking. Of course, he had the answer:
"Plain frozen cream is hard as a rock. Sugar makes it softer, but also lowers its freezing point (the dissolved sugar molecules get in the way as the water molecules settle into ordered crystals)."
I love learning the answer. Now all I have to do is turn that knowledge into action. I just might have to make several batches of caramel ice cream in search of the perfect texture. Volunteer tasters, contact me.
Consider yourself contacted for all future caramel ice cream experiments, despite the exercise implications.
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