Peanut Butter Truffle

It's been a while since I've made ice cream! While it has been a busy few months, it was time to get back into the test kitchen and create the next flavor for the Shoppe.

The chocolate truffles have been a favorite mix in for ice cream lately, so I wanted to make those again. As I was looking for a base to complement the truffles, I saw some peanut butter sitting in the pantry and thought a Reese's-like flavor would be a good treat.

Rating: 4 scoops

I really like the peanut butter base in this recipe - it has a nice bite to it that was very smooth. The extra protein contributed by the peanut butter helps solidify the base and as a result, is hard to scoop if I've just taken it out of the freezer. For any ice cream that needs peanut butter flavor, this is my go-to.

However, the truffles I made for this ice cream were very soft, smearing all over my cutting board when chopping them, and hard to handle in general - resulting in a rating with fewer scoops. While the flavor was still good, I realized on hindsight that I used semi-sweet chocolate for it instead of the bittersweet I typically use (just what I had on hand at the time). Semi-sweet chocolate has more sugar, so the freezing point is lower and they didn't get as firm in the freezer. For some recipes, this would be ideal but I wanted the discrete chunks that you could scoop with your spoon for this recipe. I've seen the impact due to sugar ratios on other recipes, most notably my chocolate ice cream. It can be hard to manage, especially if the chocolate you are accustomed to using is not available so you need to swap to a different chocolate that has a different sugar content.

To make this ice cream, I started with a Philly base, but swapped out 100 g of cream for 100 g of peanut butter, blended into the cool base. The fat in the peanut butter would both help replace the missing fat due to less cream and also contribute additional protein, helping to thicken up the base in the freezer.

To make the truffles, I warmed up some cream then added the chopped chocolate to melt it. From there, I froze the mixture before scooping them into small truffles with a little cookie scoop. At this point, I should have realized something was not right compared to previous times since it was overly soft but I couldn't figure out why at the time. The different chocolate became apparent to me when I was trying to cut up the truffles into smaller pieces and I had only gotten through a quarter of them before they were "melting" on my cutting board whereas I normally could get through all of them. But in any case, they were still delicious if not a bit messy.

With Christmas coming up, it's time to start thinking about new flavors to make for the remainder of the year. Eggnog is always a favorite and there will be at least one batch of that made, but it's also time for a new flavor! More to come.