Stracciatella: Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Without the Bite
On a recent vacation to Ithaca, New York, I sampled some of the flavors at Purity Ice Cream, a local parlor that has been serving scoops since 1936. Normally I'm pretty decisive when it comes to placing my order, but this time, as the line snaked forward and my turn approached, I found myself at an unexpected loss. There were so many flavors and add-ins—a dizzying array of ripples and swirls, chips and chunks as far as the eye could see. One kind even involved tiny chocolate cows!
In the end I settled on the appropriately named Finger Lakes Tourist, which consisted of chocolate ice cream studded with white chocolate chunks and toasted hazelnuts. It was delicious, but as I savored my cone I found myself wondering: whatever happened to the original, most basic form of chocolate chip ice cream?
In Italian, stracciatella literally means "torn apart." The eponymous gelato flavor is chocolate chip ice cream in its purest form: vanilla with fine chocolate shavings. The shavings melt in your mouth along with the ice cream, resulting in a very smooth taste unlike that of American chocolate chip ice creams, which often involve pieces of chocolate the size of small coins.
In an effort to make a homemade version of stracciatella in my trusty Cuisinart ICE-20 Ice Cream Maker, I turned to award-winning cookbook author and chocolate master Nick Malgieri. At first, I was a little apprehensive about his recipe because it involved no egg yolks—in my experience, yolk-omission often leads to ice cream with an inferior flaky (as opposed to silky) mouthfeel—but I trust Nick, so I muscled on. According to his recipe, the trick to achieving chocolate shavings is to drizzle melted chocolate mixed with a little bit of oil into the gelato as it freezes. In theory, the chocolate will freeze in little bits as it hits the cold mixture.
I don't know if I was drizzling too fast, or if I should have used a smaller spoon, but my chocolate ended up freezing as large ribbons. The ribbons then broke apart as they churned, creating chocolate chunks of various shapes and sizes. The resulting gelato was undeniably delicious, but it lacked the smooth, integrated vanilla-chocolate texture I was going for.
Ah well—there are far worse things in life than slightly too chunky gelato!
Gelato Stracciatella
- makes 2 quarts -
Adapted from Chocolate by Nick Malgieri.
Ingredients
1 quart (4 cups) whole milk
3 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 pint (2 cups) heavy cream
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup nonfat dry milk powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted
2 teaspoons mild vegetable oil, such as corn or canola
Procedure
1. Combine the milk, corn syrup, and cream in a large saucepan. In a medium bowl, stir together the sugar, gelatin, and milk powder. Whisk the dry ingredients into the milk-cream mixture, and bring to barely a simmer, stirring constantly over moderate heat.
2. Remove the mixture from heat and cool. Stir in the vanilla. Chill the mixture until very cold, at least four hours or overnight.
3. Freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. As the ice cream is churning, combine the melted chocolate and the oil. Drizzle into the ice cream for the last few minutes of churning.
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8 Comments:
I found some stracciatella gelato on the Cornell U campus this summer. Yum!
On a related note - This summer the Ithaca Journal is working on creating an Ice Cream Trail that will feature the best ice cream shops in the Ithaca/Finger Lakes region. I think its a great idea and a great complement to the other trails (Wine Trails, Art Trails, Discovery Trails, etc...) that highlight some of the great things about living in Upstate NY.
Link to story: http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080728/LIFESTYLE22/807280307/1024/LIFESTYLE
pmagnus at 11:34AM on 07/29/08
The absence of stracciatella at most US purveyors of ice cream (or even gelaterie) is yet another indication of how much further we need to go to match our better Italian (and other) counterparts. Stracciatella is almost always one of the basic flavors in any decent Italian gelaterie, along with crema, chocolate, vanilla, etc. And it is also one of the easiest to make, simply by adding the chocolate chips into the base.
If you can find real gelato (egg based, not from a dehydrated mix) being offered, odds are they can make it. Now Badiani requires a little more work! But we can always hope.
cocopazzo at 12:11PM on 07/29/08
You can add the chocolate after you churned the gelato and before it goes in the freezer. Drizzle over gelato, then stir every thing up to break up the chocolate to desire size. It's easier to control the chocolate size and distribution then to do it while the machine is going.
gnomatic at 12:54PM on 07/29/08
Thrifty's, my favorite ice cream label, might still make it's chocolate chip with the chocoalte flakes, as opposed to the horrible labels that use chocolate watermelon seeds. Ecch.
As for ice cream without eggs, just a couple of nights ago, I was thumbing through Claire Clark's Indulge cookbook, which uses some of the recipes she uses at The French Laundry as well as some of her personal favorites, and her ice cream recipe also exclues eggs. She wrote that she learned the recipe while teaching at Le Cordon Bleu. Another chef was preparing the ice cream for a lesson, and she was surprised to see it excluded eggs, but when she tried it, she found it was just as creamy and flavorful as her recipe that used eggs. She went on to say that she always used the recipe now, especially with fruit flavors.
OneWallKitchen at 3:18PM on 07/29/08
I'd get Stracciatella all the time when I lived in Germany... and I'd get Waldemeister. YUM.
smile at 3:44AM on 07/30/08
Halleluiah! I grew up on the flaked chocolate chip rather than the chunked.. and I miss it terribly.. Baskin Robbins chocolate chip was flaked last time I looked so it's out there somewhere....
cambriana at 8:48AM on 07/30/08
Gelateria Naia, my old hangout in San Francisco, makes a serious stracciatella. Flakes of chocolate and delicious, milky gelato. My trick was to spoon it into my mouth and let it melt. The gelato melts first followed by the chocolate... sigh...
newEastCoaster at 12:22PM on 07/30/08
Straciatella is actually NOT made with vanilla ice cream as its base. It's made with "fiordilatte" (flower of milk/milk) flavored ice cream which does not contain vanilla. Vanilla is not that common in Italy (available in an "aroma" form, pre-flavored dessert rising powder, or the actual beans, but expensive) and most gelaterias won't even have vanilla "Vaniglia" as a flavor on its own.
Fiordilatte is a pure, creamy flavor but I do miss vanilla quite a bit. This is why the US ice cream will never taste the same as the Italian gelato...the vanilla!
rosso99 at 10:54AM on 08/24/08