White Chocolate and Yogurt Ice Cream

White chocolate is both sweet and rich.  It requires balance.  When we made our white chocolate consomme last year we tempered it with buttermilk to produce a broth which highlighted balanced decadence.  In some ways I believe white chocolate embodies overindulgence in the sweet world.  It is almost pure fat, actually fat and sugar, and was my favorite chocolate as a child.  These days our use of white chocolate ebbs and flows, mostly ebbing with the passage of time.

This week has been difficult, the guiding light being an autumnal dessert I have been working on.  The ice cream for the dessert needed to be both comforting and bracing.  Here is where I turned to white chocolate.  Yet, as I noted, its richness needed taming.  While buttermilk may have worked in the broth, its thin nature was not what I wanted in an ice cream.  Instead, I turned to non-fat Greek yogurt.  It is pre-drained which results in an extremely thick non-fat yogurt.  I also used a bit of half and half in the base and a pinch of salt to complete the ingredient list.

As for the process, I heated the half and half and salt together to just below a boil and slowly poured it over the chopped white chocolate and then stirred it to melt it and make it into a silken emulsion.  I then folded the drained yogurt into the white chocolate emulsion until it was completely incorporated, strained the mixture and let it chill.  When the mixture was cold I sent it for a spin in our ice cream maker.  While the base is delicious in its chilled state, it takes on a whole different nature when frozen as ice cream.

The ingredients:

250g half and half
4g salt
225g chopped white chocolate
300g non-fat Greek Yogurt