I sometimes try to make “chewy” ice cream using evaporated milk or dulce de leche made using the “boil a can of sweetened condensed milk” method in the base.
For the batch I’m wrangling now, I used a 14oz can of dulce de leche, 3 cups of heavy cream, a uhh… lot(?) of cocoa powder (I just added more until the dairy looked like it’s not getting darker anymore) and a 4oz bar of dark chocolate. (The dulce de leche adding around 220g of sugar.)
When chilled, this thickened into a puddingy paste that barely flows without coaxing, and my (cheap) ice cream machine started being unable to move it in about 10-15 minutes. (Although a thermometer registered the mixture as below freezing near the middle-ish.)
I usually just pry this out of the machine and into the freezer because what else am I going to do, and end up with fairly tough, albeit not icy icecream.
Is there anything that would make this base easier to work with without significantly changing the ingredients? Recipes for this style of ice cream usually have even more evaporated milk compared to the rest in them, sometimes even adding egg yolks which would likely thicken this even more. (Based on my experiences making chocolate+caramel icecream, replacing sugar in the recipe with caramel made out of it seems to make it so that using egg yolks is the difference between having the base churnable or not.)
I’ve been debating whipping the liquid up (or maybe just tossing it into a blender) before and after chilling to aerate it before it goes into the churn – after all it’s mostly cream and should be around 25% butterfat, but I have no idea if this would be helpful, and maybe there’s better tricks.
Best Answer
From the clarification in your comments, it sounds like the amount of solids that you are introducing to your recipe is effectively absorbing almost all of the liquid ingredients that are typically added.
If you want the mixture to be easier to manipulate for the churn, I think your best options are to either introduce more liquid (and thus dilute the other solid ingredients) or to reduce the quantity of solid ingredients that you are using in the first place.
Note that as far as I can tell, for the purposes of this recipe with regards to ease of churning, I consider the cocoa powder, dark chocolate, and to a lesser extent egg yolk and evaporated milk as "solids". These are all things that will cause the liquid in your recipe to solidify faster when chilled vs. the usual liquid ingredients.
Hope this is helpful. Good luck!