I couldn’t help but eat half of this gelato before it even had a chance to freeze and went to heaven. The hazelnut heaven.
What makes you choose a recipe to try the first time you open a cookbook? An enticing photo? A favorite ingredient used in the recipe? Raves you read on food blogs?
All of the above? For me, it is sometimes the technique that is used. I’m all ears when there is an extraction of flavorful juices. 5 minutes after I read Dorie rubbing the warmed-up sugar with lemon zest in one of her recipes, I was zesting oranges. The result was Orange Grove Cookies.
And when I read David instructing to squeeze the soaked hazelnuts to extract their juices, I knew I had to try the recipe. Even tough it is quite early to decide that this is my favorite recipe from the book, there is a strong hunch that it just may be.
A special recipe like this deserves special treatment. I decided to serve it in between wafer halvas. It is quite common in Turkey to eat ice cream smeared on top of the delicate and crunchy wafer halva discs. If you’re living in the US, here is where you can buy it from.
Gianduja Stracciatella Gelato Recipe
Recipe from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz
Ingredients
- 1+1/2 cups (185 g) hazelnuts, toasted
- 1 cup whole milk
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
- 4 ounces milk chocolate, finely chopped
- 5 large egg yolks
- 1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
Method
- Rub the hazelnuts in a kitchen towel to remove as much of the papery skins as possible, then finely chop them in a food processor or blender.
- Warm the milk with 1 cup of the cream, sugar, and salt in a saucepan. Once warm, remove from the heat and add the chopped hazelnuts. Cover and let steep at room temperature for 1 hour.
- Put the milk chocolate pieces in a large bowl. Heat the remaining 1 cup (250 ml) cream in a medium saucepan until it just begins to boil. Pour it over the milk chocolate pieces and stir until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth. Set a mesh strainer over the top.
- Pour the hazelnut-infused milk through a strainer into a medium saucepan, squeezing the nuts firmly with your hands to extract as much of the flavorful liquid as possible. Discard the hazelnuts.
- Rewarm the hazelnut-infused mixture. In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Slowly pour the warm hazelnut mixture into the egg yolks, whisking constantly, then scrape the warmed egg yolks back into the saucepan.
- Stir the mixture constantly over medium heat with a heatproof spatula, scraping the bottom as you stir, until the mixture thickens and coats the spatula. Pour the custard through the strainer and stir it into the milk chocolate mixture. Add the vanilla and stir until cool over an ice bath.
- Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator.
- In a clean and absolutely dry bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water, melt the chocolate, stirring it until it’s completely smooth.
- Start freezing the gelato in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Drizzle a very thin stream of the warm chocolate into 1 quart of ice cream during the last possible moment of churning. If the chocolate clings too much to the dasher, remove the ice cream from the machine and drizzle the chocolate into the frozen ice cream by hand while you layer it into the storage container, breaking up any chunks as you stir.