Chocolate Ice Cream Day

What the day is

Chocolate Ice Cream Day is observed on June 7. It celebrates the second most popular ice cream flavor in most surveys, and the one with the longer history.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The flavor's history is better recorded and mildly surprising: frozen chocolate preparations appear in European recipe collections, particularly from Naples, by the late seventeenth century, at a point when chocolate was a fashionable drink among the wealthy and frozen desserts were a novelty. Chocolate ices predate vanilla ones in the written record.

Chocolate is also the harder flavor to execute. Ice cream is an emulsion of fat, water, sugar, air and ice crystals, and its texture depends on keeping those in balance. Cocoa solids absorb water and add starch-like bulk, which makes the mix thicker but also more prone to freezing hard, while cocoa butter is a fat that sets firmer than dairy fat at freezer temperatures. A chocolate base that tastes perfect when liquid can freeze into a block.

That is why good recipes treat it as its own problem rather than vanilla with cocoa added. The usual adjustments are a little more sugar, which depresses the freezing point, a combination of cocoa powder for flavor and melted chocolate for body, and careful attention to total fat.

Dutch-process and natural cocoa behave differently as well. Dutch-process is alkalized, darker and mellower; natural cocoa is more acidic and fruitier. Either works, and they taste noticeably different in the same recipe.

How to take part

• Bloom the cocoa. Whisking it into a little hot liquid before building the base dissolves it properly and deepens the flavor.
• Chill the base thoroughly, ideally overnight. Warm mix churns badly and produces coarse crystals.
• Add a pinch of salt and a spoonful of espresso. Neither reads as itself; both make the chocolate taste more like chocolate.
• Let it sit out five to ten minutes before serving. Chocolate ice cream is almost always served too cold to taste.
• Compare a dark, a milk-style and a cocoa-only version side by side. They are three different desserts.