Vegan Date Caramel Gelato

Cooked flavour with nothing cooked in it: deep, treacly and faintly salty, thick enough to coat the tongue and slow to fade once the cold lets go.

Long after the spoon has gone, something rich is still sitting on the tongue. That tail is the fat: cashew and coconut coat the palate on contact, so the entry is round rather than sharp, and the whole scoop eats warmer than a freezer would suggest. The caramel builds in between, dried fruit and a little molasses and the toasted edge the fruit picked up as it dried, never the scorch of burnt sugar. Salt turns up halfway through and cuts the sweetness before it can settle. At 160 g per kilo the dates carry about half the sweet load, which is why the added sucrose stays down at 40 g.

That is why free sucrose is only 40 g, and it has to be. Sugars close at 18.22 percent against an 18 percent floor, the tightest that indicator runs on any sheet here, and there is simply no room to add more. At the same time POD reads 188.36 against a 195 ceiling. Put those two side by side and you have the whole recipe: the least sugar by weight, close to the most sweetness by perception, because inverted sugars are sweeter per gram than sucrose.

20 g of coconut sugar reinforces the molasses note without weighing much on the sugar line, and 2 g of salt is what separates the taste of dates from the taste of caramel. Fat and protein are assembled from 84 g of cashew paste, 120 g of coconut milk and 30 g of coconut oil, closing at 10.49 percent fat and 2.5 percent protein, and 17 g of inulin covers for MSNF, which reads 0.00.

Ingredients

Makes 1000 g of finished base.

Method

Dates soaked at 60 to 70 C, blended and pushed through a fine sieve, pasteurised at 85 C

1. 1Whisk every dry ingredient together first: sugars, milk powder, stabiliser and salt. Dry-blending them stops the stabiliser clumping when it meets liquid.
2. 2Warm the liquids to 40 C (104 F), then rain the dry mix in while whisking hard.
3. 3Heat to 82 C (180 F) and hold for 2 minutes so the stabiliser hydrates.
4. 4Off the heat, whisk in the paste, then blend 60 seconds so the fat emulsifies instead of separating.
5. 5Chill in an ice bath to under 5 C (41 F) within 2 hours. Slow cooling is where bacteria and coarse crystals both start.
6. 6Age 6 to 12 hours in the fridge under 5 C (41 F). This is when the stabiliser and the milk protein take up water.
7. 7Freeze in a shallow metal pan 2 to 3 cm deep, breaking the crystals with a fork every 30 to 40 minutes, 4 to 6 times.
8. 8Freeze firm, then temper 10 to 15 minutes in the fridge before scooping.

The balance

All six against the professional range for Vegan Base.

Sugars at 18.22 percent sitting on an 18 percent floor while POD reads 188.36 just under a 195 ceiling is not a coincidence, it is the whole design. Date sugars are already inverted, and inverted sugars are both sweeter per gram and more anticryoscopic per gram than sucrose. So 160 g of dates buys sweetness and freezing point depression at the same time, and the recipe runs out of POD headroom long before it runs out of sugar allowance. That is exactly why free sucrose is held down at 40 g. PAC lands at 259.03 in a 210 to 300 window, which is mid band and deliberate, because pushing the dates higher would carry PAC up with them and the base would never firm properly. Fat at 10.49 percent is split three ways so that raising cashew paste to serve protein, which sits at 2.5 percent, does not immediately threaten the 13 percent fat ceiling, since every gram of cashew brings nearly half a gram of fat with it.

If it goes wrong

Allergens: gluten, milk, tree nuts

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