Dark Chocolate Ice Cream
Dense, deeply cocoa-forward ice cream with 70% dark chocolate and honey rather than a sweet milk-chocolate profile.
Tested and worth making again.
Ingredients
Tap ingredients as you weigh them.
Dark-chocolate base
The small print names the exact — often Dutch — products this recipe was calculated with. Equivalents work, but if a label differs materially, the formula deserves a recalculation.
Prepare
Disperse the guar
In a dry bowl, thoroughly combine the cocoa powder, guar gum, and salt. Break up every visible lump and make sure the guar is evenly diluted through the cocoa before it touches liquid.
Melt the chocolate
Take 100 g from the measured whole milk and heat it until steaming but not boiling. Remove it from the heat, add the dark chocolate, leave it undisturbed for 30 seconds, then stir until completely smooth.
Add the cocoa mixture
Gradually whisk the dry mixture into the warm chocolate milk. Continue whisking until the cocoa is fully dispersed and no dry pockets or gummy guar clumps remain.
Finish the base
Add the remaining 131 g whole milk, full-fat evaporated coffee milk, honey, and optional vanilla. Use an immersion blender for about 60 seconds, keeping the blade submerged so the base becomes uniform without deliberately whipping in air.
Chill
Cover and refrigerate the base until completely cold, for 1-4 hours. Four hours gives the guar more hydration time. Do not put a warm base into the freezer or machine. Stir gently before filling if any separation is visible.
Fill and freeze
Pour the approximately 461 g base into the NC300EU pint, or approximately 463 g when using the optional vanilla. Confirm the base remains below the molded MAX FILL line, fit the storage lid, and freeze on a level surface for at least 24 hours.
Spin plan
Confirm the frozen surface is level, there is no tall hard hump, the pint remains below MAX FILL, and the base is within -12°C to -25°C. Safely flatten any pronounced hump before installing the pint.
Run Ice Cream once.
The tested batch was powdery after the first cycle. Scrape the sides inward, make a small well, add 5 g whole milk (1 tsp), and RE-SPIN once. It should become creamy; stop rather than adding another cycle if it is already soft.
Smooth leftovers flat before refreezing. When hard, rerun Ice Cream rather than RE-SPIN.
Notebook
Test notes
Tested successfully on 19 July 2026. The first Ice Cream cycle was powdery; adding 5 g whole milk and running one RE-SPIN produced a great dense, intensely chocolatey result.
- Freezer temperature:
- Frozen-base temperature before processing:
- First-spin texture: Powdery
- RE-SPIN required: Yes, with 5 g whole milk
- Chocolate intensity and bitterness: Great; intensely chocolatey
- Sweetness and honey character: Great
- Cocoa dryness or chalkiness: None noted after RE-SPIN
- Sidewall ice: Not recorded
- Melt and immediate serving texture: Dense and creamy after RE-SPIN
- Refreeze result:
- Changes for the next batch: None currently required
Formula details PAC, POD, and solids for the curious
- Convention
- Sucrose = 1; includes honey sugars, chocolate sugar, and lactose
- PAC
- 26.8
- POD
- 16.7
- Total solids
- 36.9%
- Fat
- 8.5%
- Protein
- 5.2%
- Formula values describe the approximately 461 g base without optional vanilla.
- Honey sugar is estimated at 81% of honey weight and modeled with invert-sugar FPDF 1.9 and POD 1.3. Lactose uses PAC 1.0 and POD 0.2.
- Chocolate and cocoa introduce hard cocoa butter and may make the frozen base behave harder than PAC alone predicts.
- The coffee-milk calculation uses the current AH Volle koffiemelk label and its 500 g per 463 ml package density; a materially different product requires recalculation.
- Nutrition is estimated from current AH whole-milk, AH coffee-milk, Delicata 70% chocolate, Blooker cocoa, and AH mild liquid-honey labels.
- Physically tested successfully: the powdery first spin became creamy after adding 5 g whole milk and running one RE-SPIN. Refreeze behavior remains untested.