Dark Chocolate Strawberry Ice Cream

6oz. Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate

1/3 cup Dutch cocoa powder

2 cups cream

1 cup milk

2 tsp vanilla

4 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

Melt the chocolate in a barely simmering double boiler:

Combine the egg yolks and sugar in a metal bowl. Whip them until smooth and light-yellow:

In a sauce pan, combine milk, cream, vanilla, and cocoa powder, bring to a boil and immediately remove form heat (watch it closely and keep a spoon or whisk handy to stir it to keep it from boiling over!)

Add a splash of the the hot cream/cocoa to the egg/sugar bowl while stirring the eggs. The rest of the hot cream/cocoa can be added to the eggs slowly with plenty of stirring to ensure that the eggs don't get scrambled! Once all the cream/cocoa is incorporated, add the melted chocolate and whisk it all together until it is evenly combined.

At this point I put the bowl in the freezer, but it could also be left in the fridge for several hours. The point is to cool this pre-ice-cream soup as much as possible without freezing it, yet. When I put it in the freezer, I keep an eye on it, stirring ever 5-15min to make sure it's not freezing and cooling evenly.

Once it feels cold to the touch, but is still liquid (a very thick liquid in this case!) it can be transferred to an ice cream maker! The bowl of the ice cream machine must be frozen at least 12 hours prior to making ice cream! I just keep my bowl in the freezer so it's ready to use whenever the mood strikes me. Also, make sure the paddle is in the bowl before your pour the ice-cream-soup in because the soup will freeze upon contact with the bowl making it almost impossible to insert the paddle afterwards!

(I totally recommend this CuisineArt Ice Cream Maker!)

After about half an hour, it will look like soft-serve ice cream. This means it's done!

This is also the time to add things like syrup, chocolate chips, cookie crumbles, or fruit. In this case, I used diced strawberries:

As soon as all the strawberries were in, I turned it off and then worked quickly to get the ice cream out of the machine, into a bowl, and into the freezer. Ice cream can be eaten immediately out of the ice cream maker, though it is very soft. I recommend freezing it further in the freezer. 

This ice cream turned out to have a super rich, bitter, dark-chocolate flavor punctuated with bits of frozen strawberry. If you're a fan of sweeter milk-chocolate, some extra sugar should be added to this recipe. The texture is interesting, almost more like a very cold mousse rather than ice cream. I'm suspicious this texture might come from whipping the eggs and sugar together. I usually just mix the eggs and sugar until they're evenly combined, but no whipped. I got the idea to whip them this time from a chocolate ice cream recipe I found elsewhere on the internet. Anyway, this ice cream is still totally delicious!