Milk Chocolate Chip Amaro Ice Cream

I was dangerously low on chocolate during the recent lockdown and fortunately, the owner of a neighborhood bakery kindly gave me a big bag of chocolate to bake with. (I didn’t tell him that most of the time, my “baking” chocolate, gets snacked on.) When I offered to pay for it – three times! – he finally said, “Just bring me something you make with it.” When he saw the panic in my eyes, at the idea of bringing something I made to a lovely French bakery, he said, “Daveed, don’t worry about it. C’est pas grave,” letting me gently off the hook.

Fast forward to when the lockdown ended, I’ve been going through my kitchen, using stuff up left and right. A quarter-bag of standard round rice went into making a pot of risotto, rather than going out and purchasing arborio rice. (Romain said it was the best risotto he’d ever had. So there!) A few jars of sun-dried tomatoes got made into a deliciously different pesto, and the bottom of a jar of leftover zhoug got pureed with additional herbs and olive oil, to use as pasta sauce. And some milk chocolate that had been lingering around in my pantry got churned into this Milk Chocolate Chip-Amaro ice cream.

Milk chocolate can be a tough sell. “It’s not chocolate!” some will say, which is true. It’s milk chocolate. However, all milk chocolates aren’t the same. Legally in the U.S. milk chocolate only needs to have 10% cacao solids (cocoa bean mass) whereas in Europe, that number is 30%. Some chocolate-makers in the U.S. are now making “dark” milk chocolates whose percentages are similar to those in Europe (24-40%) and I strongly recommend using one of them to make this ice cream.

I decided to give a batch of this to the bakery owner who has kids, so didn’t add any amaro to theirs. But for us adults, the bitter amaro makes a spot-on counterpoint to the milk-rich chocolate. Amari range from being somewhat sweet and fruity, to being a full-on, nearly undrinkable mouthful of bitter roots and herbs. There’s no standard definition of amaro (or amer, in French) and having a friend who literally wrote the book on Amaro, I’ve tasted a lot of them, but it’s hard to gauge how much to add since each bottle is different. So in the headnote of the recipe, I’ve giving advice on how to adjust for what amaro you’ve got on hand, or what amaro you’re using. (You can also leave it out, too.)

To get nice little chips in the ice cream, I use an Italian technique for stracciatella, where melted chocolate is drizzled into the churned ice cream, which freezes into little chips. The small opening on my ice cream machine requires good aim, which requires some patience to drizzle slowly through.

If your ice cream maker has a larger opening than mine, you can drizzle the melted chocolate right in while the machine is running. (Whatever machine you use, if it starts to cling to the dasher, stop the machine and scrape that down.) Or, you can layer the just-churned ice cream in a container, drizzling chocolate on it as you go, and stirring it to make little “chips.” You’ll want to work quickly so the ice cream doesn’t melt. And most importantly, don’t use the same spoon that you dip in the melted chocolate to stir the ice cream with. If you do, you’ll introduce liquid to the melted chocolate, which can cause it to seize.