cajeta ice cream
perfect for when it's
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Welcome back to bake chats xx
Last month I finally shared my base ice cream recipe. After two years of testing I finally landed on my ideal ice cream recipe. Now that I have the perfect base, it’s much easier for me to riff and get to developing new flavors of ice cream. Over the years, I’ve spent time building up my personal library of the “basics” so that way instead of starting from scratch every single time I want something, I can refer to my own recipes as jumping off points. Because remember, “Recipes are starting points, not finish lines”.
With the two years I spent working on my ice cream recipe, I learned a lot about ice cream, how it “works” and the role every ingredient plays in this ratio/formula. Now I get to have fun with it, because I deeply believe you need to understand the rules so you know how to “break” them. So now, instead of spending another two years and 22+ rounds of testing and revisions to make a cajeta ice cream, I make a couple of tweaks and two rounds of tweaking later I’ve got a new flavor of ice cream that has the textural qualities I set out for my base ice cream recipe to have.
To take my base from vanilla to cajeta the main thing I was focused on was making the right amount of cajeta to have the proper amount of sugar in the recipe. Which is why we make our own cajeta for this recipe so we can be in total control of the amount of sugar used. You can use a premade jar of cajeta, but then you gotta do some math to figure how much sugar is per serving to then calculate how much you’d need to add to fully replace the sugar… For some reason that simple math just felt way more complicated than making cajeta from scratch lol. That’s just you know, how this brain works.
And if you’re not familiar- cajeta is dulce de leche’s goat milk counter part. Goat milk and sugar are simmered low and slow until the sugars + proteins under-go a maillard leaving you with a thick caramelized final product. Should you not really jive with the flavor of goat milk, you can totally sub it out in this recipe whole whole milk, leaving ya with a dulce de leche ice cream instead. Another reason we want to make our own cajeta here is to be in full control of the flavor and the color- I like to take it much darker/thicker than I would if I were going to use it in more of a saucey application so that those deep caramel notes come through in the final product. I also deeply infuse the cajeta with cinnamon and star anise, which is another place you’re in full control of the flavor.
