One-Step No-Churn Coffee Ice Cream
This recipe is incredibly easy to make, yet the flavor is deep, complex, and utterly compelling. It requires no custard and no ice cream maker. It's delicious served with chocolate sauce or in little brioches, like sweet burger buns. The recipe uses espresso liqueur, but any coffee liqueur will work. You can even try using instant coffee granules (increased quantity, dissolved in hot water). This recipe makes 1 pint.
This recipe is incredibly easy to make, yet the flavor is deep, complex, and utterly compelling. It requires no custard and no ice cream maker. It's delicious served with chocolate sauce or in little brioches, like sweet burger buns. The recipe uses espresso liqueur, but any coffee liqueur will work. You can even try using instant coffee granules (increased quantity, dissolved in hot water). This recipe makes 1 pint.
- Carbohydrate 14.390765625661 g
- Cholesterol 34.1434375324581 mg
- Fat 9.09818750876604 g
- Fiber 0 g
- Protein 2.39822187548569 g
- Saturated Fat 5.68144250545674 g
- Serving Size 1 1 Serving (44g)
- Sodium 39.450625009003 mg
- Sugar 14.390765625661 g
- Trans Fat 0.469518750452042 g
- Calories 146 calories
Step-by-step
- Serve this handmade coffee ice cream with a chocolate sauce, or squidge it into little brioches, like sweet burger buns, as they do in the south of Italy.
- Put the condensed milk in a bowl and stir in the espresso powder and liqueur.
- In a separate bowl whisk the cream until it reaches soft peaks.
- Fold the cream into the condensed milk mixture, then pour this gorgeous, caffe-latte–colored, airy mixture into an airtight container and freeze for 6 hours or overnight.
- Serve straight from the freezer.
Whisking the heavy cream only until it holds soft peaks is the critical juncture determining whether the final texture remains light or turns grainy and buttery. When cream is beaten past this stage, the fat globules clump together permanently, trapping air unevenly and ruining the velvety mouthfeel expected from a frozen dessert. Stopping precisely when the whisk leaves soft, curling trails ensures the dairy can properly suspend the sweetened condensed milk without collapsing.
Sweetened condensed milk functions here as both sweetener and stabilizer because its low water content prevents large ice crystals from forming during the six-hour freezing window. Traditional custard-based methods require careful temperature monitoring on a stovetop to cook egg yolks safely, whereas this simplified approach relies entirely on the high sugar concentration of the canned milk to depress the freezing point and maintain scoopability straight from a minus-eighteen-degree Celsius freezer.
Instant espresso powder dissolves efficiently into the condensed milk without introducing excess moisture that would otherwise encourage unwanted crystallization. Swapping the espresso liqueur for a standard coffee liqueur requires no ratio adjustments, but utilizing plain instant coffee granules instead necessitates doubling the dry volume and dissolving it in a half teaspoon of hot water to match the flavor intensity of the concentrated extract.
Encasing frozen sweets inside small brioche rolls is a traditional regional practice found in Sicily, where the starch of the enriched bread contrasts sharply against the rich, cold dairy. Storing the mixture inside a shallow, airtight plastic container rather than a deep bowl accelerates the initial heat transfer, allowing the core temperature to drop below freezing before large ice structures have time to nucleate.
