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My staff is having a hard time scooping our Peanut Butter Ice cream. It's too rock hard. We make the Ice cream in-house using a 15% Super Premium base. I want to know what can I add to soften the ice Cream.

Here is the Recipe:

  • 52 oz of liquid Peanut Butter
  • 1 oz Vanilla Extract
  • 2.5 Gallons of Ice Cream Base
  • We run the ice cream at max level 12 in our Caprigani Ice Cream Machine

The Stabilizers in the Base: Mono & Diglycerides, Cellulose Gum, Gaur Gum, Carrageenan, Dextrose, Silicone Dioxide to prevent caking.

Phil
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Mona
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    What is the composition of your base? – zetaprime Feb 10 '20 at 23:53
  • The Composition of the base is: Milk, Cream, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Whey Solids, nonfat milk, edible salts and Stabilizer (I included what all is in this above). – Mona Feb 11 '20 at 12:39
  • What have you tried so far, if anything? – Onyz Feb 11 '20 at 12:47
  • (1) I tried running the Ice cream at lower level at 11. Haven't done much (2) The Peanut Butter Liquid usually separate - oli & butter. So we use a mixer to blend that before we pour it in the Ice Cream. I was doing some research and it says to add Gaur or xanthan gum gum. But I wasn't too sure. Also my base already has Gaur Gum in it. – Mona Feb 11 '20 at 13:13

4 Answers4

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Heat the scoop?

scoop sink

source

If you are serving lots of ice cream maybe you already have one of these. If not it might come in handy. The flowing water warms up the scoop which then more easily cuts its way thru the hard ice cream.

Willk
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A quick but probably undesirable answer is that you can add alcohol to ice cream in order to not allow it to freeze as hard. I'm guessing however that you are not looking to get your patrons drunk and to be fair I can't imagine an alcohol that would go well with peanut butter, so we won't go with that.

That being said ice cream freezes very hard when there is low fat content in the product. Higher water content = more icy consistency. Stabilizers are added in order to give the appearance of creaminess despite not having a high fat content by retarding the growth of ice crystals.

The best thing to do would be to check an ice cream recipe that doesn't freeze very hard and try to aim for a fat content that is similar to that. I've never used liquid peanut butter but to me that sounds like it would be lacking in the fat that's normally in peanut butter and because of this the ratio is off. I could however be wrong.

Jamus
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Sugar or alcohol make IC softer. On denser flavors like dark chocolate and PB, we use 1/3 C vodka to 3 Gallons IC. Sugar works too but if you do not want to add sweetness - vodka is the trick.

iScream Berkeley
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Let it sit and partially melt, until it is soft enough. That should solve your problem! As pointed out in comments, storing it at a slightly higher temperature should prevent the problem from happening in the future.

  • also: keep it at a higher temperature so it doesn't become so hard again. – Luciano Feb 11 '20 at 09:54
  • Thanks Asadefa. It's a fast pace restaurant setting and its not practical for us to do this as we are really busy and go through lots of Ice Cream. and its a 1.5 lb bucket so it would need to sit outside of a long time before it is soft enough to scoop. – Mona Feb 11 '20 at 12:41
  • @Mona Make it the day before, and store it at a higher temperature, maybe? – nick012000 Feb 11 '20 at 14:31
  • @Mona Possibly store it at a higher temperature, not so warm that it just becomes ice cream, but not so cold that it becomes ice solid. –  Feb 11 '20 at 15:12