Black sesame ice cream is a sweet, nutty, and unique treat complemented with shards of chocolate studded throughout. You are going to fall in love with its fun color and rich, nutty flavor.
Key ingredients
This recipe is a Philadelphia-style ice cream base unlike a custard base like my homemade vanilla ice cream. There are a few key ingredients that are important to quickly review before making the ice cream.
- Milk – To get the best mouthfeel, we need to use whole milk and heavy cream. I do not recommend substituting these ingredients.
- Cream cheese –Full fat block cream cheese is the best thing to use here in this recipe. The reduced fat option has too much water content.
- Cornstarch – Cornstarch helps to thicken the ice cream without the use of eggs along with the help of the cream cheese. You can substitute it with arrowroot starch.
- Corn syrup – This is not high fructose corn syrup and is not something that is a negative to use in your recipes. It helps to reduce ice crystals in the ice cream and help keep it a delicious scoopable texture. If you are still concerned, you can substitute with honey, agave, or pure maple syrup.
- Black sesame – There are no substitutes for the black sesame in this ice cream recipe. White sesame is not a suitable substitute and does not work as an ice cream flavor with this particular recipe.
- Chocolate – For the best contrast, I recommend using dark or semi-sweet chocolate, but you can feel free to use any chocolate you like.
Making Black Sesame Paste
Black sesame paste is not the same as black tahini. Black tahini does not use toasted seeds and is typically unsweetened. When making a paste, you toast the seeds to help bring out the flavor even more. You also process it with honey so it is sweetened and ready to use for your desserts, or in this case, ice cream. It is a relatively simple process that doesn’t take long to do!
Tips for making ice cream
Ice cream is one of my favorite things to make. I’ve often considered opening up my own ice cream shop. I love the different methods for making ice cream, and want to share some tips from my years of experience.
- Have your tools ready and prepared. If you are using an ice cream maker with a base, you need to make sure it is prepared to manufacturer instructions, which oftentimes means freezing the base for 24 hours before you can add ice cream to it to churn. Luckily, you can make the ice cream a day ahead of time before churning, but it is best to have it ready in case you don’t want to have to wait to be able to enjoy a scoop!
- Have your ingredients measured out and at the right temperature before you begin. It makes the process so much more enjoyable and stress free. Knowing you are prepared also means so surprises or issues with the ice cream base which can happen if you are using cold cream cheese or accidentally dump the cornstarch directly into the milk instead of making a slurry.
- Heat your milk slowly. Turning up the heat as you cook the milk and cream will make it more likely that it will burn on the pot. Slowly warm up the milk and make sure you frequently scrape the bottom and sides of the pot as you are stirring.
- Be careful about introducing water into the ice cream while it is cooling. This is particularly important when you are putting it into an ice bath. The water will disrupt the water to fat ratio in the mix and may leave you with lots of ice crystals in your frozen ice cream.
- Let the ice cream cool in the ice bath a bit before you put it into the refrigerator to minimize the heat from the freshly cooked ice cream from raising the overall temperature of the refrigerator because that will not only slow the process, but potentially do damage to other foods in your refrigerator.
Don’t have an ice cream maker? No problem! Learn how to make ice cream without an ice cream maker here.
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