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
