If you've ever made ice cream at home, you know how challenging it can be to find the perfect mix-in. Streaks and swirls are easy, but most crunchy ingredients won't stay crunchy for long. What a tragedy! Ingredients like graham crackers, waffle cone pieces, and pretzels would turn to mush in the ice cream long before you got the chance to enjoy it. But there's a secret that professional ice cream makers know—and it's about to rock your world (or at least, your frozen desserts).
We asked Sam Mason of NYC's cult-favorite OddFellows to give us the, err, scoop: How could we make sure our crunchy add-ins stay perfectly crisp? The secret, says Mason, is chocolate. Coating crunchy bits with melted chocolate not only makes them even more delicious, it gives them a protective coating against the creamy ice cream.
To pull it off at home, melt chocolate with a little coconut oil to thin it out. A thick layer of solid chocolate won't coat your ingredients as well, and will be tougher to bite into. Break your crunchies into little pieces—they should definitely be small enough to fit on a spoon—and dip them in the melted chocolate. Allow them to cool on a wire rack until totally solidified. Then, use a flexible spatula to mix them into softened but not melted ice cream. Alternately, you can add them in to a running ice cream maker once the ice cream is almost finished mixing.
Need some inspiration? Here are just a few things that would be dynamite covered in chocolate and mixed into your next batch of homemade ice cream.
Broken-up graham crackers
Biscotti pieces
Crumbled potato chips
Pretzels
Bits of waffle cone
Granola
Fried almonds
