When: June 7
Chocolate ice cream is the second most popular flavor in the U.S. (after vanilla) but often the first choice for people who love ice cream seriously. The quality range is enormous — from flat and sweet to deeply complex and bitter — and understanding the variables is worth the exploration.
Chocolate ice cream is the flavor that people who love ice cream actually order — and there's a reason it's the standard against which everything else is measured.
The first documented recipe for chocolate ice cream appears not in France or America but in a 1692 document from the Spanish court — a record of chocolate (already imported from Mexico) combined with cream and ice. The Spanish had been consuming chocolate since colonization of Mesoamerica in the 16th century, and their court kitchens were among the first to apply the frozen dessert techniques arriving from Italy to chocolate as a flavoring. Vanilla ice cream, now considered the benchmark, was documented later. The cocoa variable is the most significant determinant of chocolate ice cream quality. Natural cocoa powder (non-alkalized) is bright, slightly acidic, and intensely "chocolatey" to most palates. Dutch-process cocoa (alkalized using a process invented by Casparus van Houten in Amsterdam in 1828) produces a darker, earthier, less acidic flavor with deeper color. Van Houten developed alkalization specifically to make cocoa dissolve cleanly in water rather than leaving a greasy...