Can I replace the sugar in ice cream with (very smooth) applesauce. I do not enjoy my desserts to be super sweet and I always have tons of homemade applesauce sitting in the fridge. How much would this affect the texture?
Sugar – Ice Cream Sugar Substitutes – Applesauce
applesice-creamsubstitutionssugar
Related Solutions
To expand michaels answer (assuming that you want strawberry icecream and not pieces of strawberry mixed in).
If you are making a custard ice cream, leave the amount of egg yolks the same, because you want the lecithin from them. Reduce the sugar somewhat, because fruit is sweet. Then decide how much fruit puree you want (maybe 1/3 the volume of the dairy part). Adjust the volume of the dairy so that the liquid is correct. Adjust the fat of the dairy so that the fat content is correct.
Example, you start with the recipe for vanilla ice cream French (=custard) style by Lebovitz.
1 cup (250ml) whole milk; A pinch of salt; 3/4 cup (150g) sugar; 1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise; 2 cups (500ml) heavy cream; 5 large egg yolks; 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
This recipe has 185g fat (I calculated with 30% fat in the cream), 460g dry matter (this is both fat and non-fat) and yields 990g ice cream (rounded a bit). Let's say that you decide to use 200g strawberry puree. 200g strawberry puree has 10g sugars, 18g dry matter and no fat. A mixture of 5 yolks, 140g sugar (if you want, you can look at the fructose sweetness coefficient and change the sugar accordingly, but I think this isn't so much of a problem if we just substitute the 10g from strawberries), 200g strawberry puree and some salt and vanilla has 25g fat, 225g dry matter and weighs 430g (rounded). You could create two equation systems, the first for the total volume of the dairy mixture needed, and the second one for the ratio of cream to milk, and solve these to get to a mixture with the original ratio.
fatamount/total = fatpercentage liquidamount/total = liquidpercentage fatpercentage + liquidpercentage + nonfatdrypercentage = 1
where you know fatamount, liquidamount and nonfatdrypercentage is around 0.1 (actually 0.08 for milk only and 0.12 for cream only, but we don't need so much precision). Solve for total, then calculate fatpercentage.
0.3*cream + 0.04*milk = fatpercentage*(milk + cream) milk + cream = total
I will take a shortcut here. I specified almost as much strawberries as milk. They have no fat (unlike milk), but a similar (actually higher) amount of dry mass. So let's see what happens when we keep the 500g cream and turn the 50g difference between strawberries and milk into cream too (because we suspect we want some more fat). Then we have 190 g fat, 290g dry matter and 980g ice cream base. At 19.38% fat, we are above the ratio given in the article, but close to the original ratio (and I suspect that the article might be about Philadelphia style ice cream, which has less fat). The 29.59% dry matter are again outside of the article recommendation, but close to the original recipe. In fact, I assume that well emulsified fat can prevent ice crystal creation, so the higher liquid content doesn't create problems here (also note that McGee gives a 10-20% range for fat in ice cream, not 7-12%).
Long story short: don't add fruit puree, it is mostly water. Substitute puree for milk, calculate the new percentage of fat and dry matter (use the 7-12% fat and 37-42% liquid for a recipe without emulsifiers, you can be freer if you have emulsifiers; egg yolk counts as emulsifier). If you are still not there, try the calculation with less puree, or increase the fat and/or dry matter until you are in the recommended range. Or just start with the equations.
NB #1 I didn't check my calculations, could have a mistake there. But the principle should be correct.
NB#2 I calculated with cream density of 1. This was somewhat surprising, but the nutrition data for cream I found insists that a cup of cream (240 ml) weighs 238 g, so the difference is small enough to not go to the trouble to convert. A recipe given by volume probably (hopefully) has some leeway, so this shouldn't skew the results into a bad recipe.
The ultimate goal of ice cream is a creamy texture. You could take those same ingredients and freeze them in a paper cup and make a fantastic mango popsicle. Popsicles and slushies are not nearly as magical as ice cream.
Creaminess in ice cream is achieved by keeping the ice crystals as small as possible. The bigger the crystals the more grainy the texture.
There are two good ways to prevent large ice crystals from forming: Reducing the amount of available water and mechanically destroying the crystals. The ice crystals are reduced mechanically by churning or in your recipe by blending- but this is an answer for a different question.
Reduce the amount of available water.
Many ingredients in ice cream will tie up some of the water and prevent it from coalescing into monolithic crystals.
- Alcohol and sugar are used in sorbets
- Gums, such as carageenan and xanthan gum, are used in commercial ice cream
- Egg custards are used in French style ice cream
- Starch gels tie up free water in Italian Gelato
- Large quantities of fat
Removing water from the recipe, and sometimes replacing it with fat, will go a long way towards making creamier ice cream.
The condensed milk in your recipe is a convenience. Using milk that has had a lot of the water removed means that there will be more fat and less water in your ice cream. This will make it much easier to make your ice cream creamy.
You could use regular milk but you would be relying on your blender to chop up the large crystals that would inevitably form. If the canned milk is too expensive, and if you have some time, you could reduce your milk yourself and get the same effect.
Related Topic
- Softening ice cream with guar gum
- Non-dairy ice cream
- Why did the ice cream turn out like this
- Ideal temperature and stabilizer for chewy ice cream
- Sugar – Impact of different sugar types (and substitutes) on ice cream
- Sugar – Unsweetened or fruit sweetened ice cream – Replacement for sugar in ice cream
- Does glucose used is added to sugar quantity in recipes like ice creams
- Higher calorie ice cream
Best Answer
Ice cream needs a certain ratio of solids to liquids to work. Sugar is an important solid in ice cream. As applesauce is mostly water, you can't replace all, or even most of the sugar.
The amount of carbohydrates in applesauce will vary depending on how much you cooked it down, but based on a few nutrition data results for the commercial variety, it seems that 40% carbohydrates is a reasonable assumption. So you want to remove some sugar and milk and add the applesauce and some butter (to compensate the missing fat). Calculating with 8% non-fat solids and 4% fat in the milk, and 83/17 fat/water ratio in the butter, we get following substitution: for each 10 g of sugar you remove, you also have to remove 20 g of milk, and add 29 g of applesauce and 1 g of butter. You probably need a recipe with emulsifiers to get the butter into it.
Most ice cream recipes will have much more cream than milk, and so not much milk available to remove. You'll have to recalculate to get the amount of butter needed when you are replacing cream. But the more dairy you remove, the more you are changing the flavor. While the texture is likely to keep up well (the pectin from the applesauce will probably do a good job to reduce ice crystals), the taste will move in direction sorbet. Depending on your expectations, this might be OK for you, or it might be a problem.
As for reducing sweetness, I am not sure this will happen. At very cold temperatures, sugar loses much of its perceived sweetness. Fructose loses some, but not all. And apples are very high in fructose. So, even though not all carbohydrates in applesauce are sugars, you might end up with a quite sweet ice cream. On the other hand, if you used sour-ish apples, the perceived sweetness will be low. There is no way to tell but try it out.