Hazelnut Ice Cream Recipe - Meet My Friend Filbert

Considering what a pain it was to find these hazelnuts, they better make for some awesome ice cream. For some reason, my local supermarket doesn't have whole hazelnuts. I guess they're not as common as I thought or I have too much faith in the modern supermarket to have all ingredients I need. I was finally able to find them at the third store I checked. I wasn't even sure what they looked like in their whole form so I had to walk around the store looking at the labels on all of the bins. At $6.99 per pound, this isn't going to be cheap ice cream. Strangely they also go by the name "filberts" and you can get them shelled or unshelled. When I hear the word "filbert," I think of it as a British butler's name. Filbert = Philip + Albert?

To be honest, I don't know if I've ever had hazelnut ice cream before. I've maybe had a spoonful of someone else's here and there but I don't recall what it tastes like. I imagine something roasted, nutty and chocolatey so it sounds pretty good on my imaginary tongue in my head. The ingredients call for chocolate, specifically milk chocolate with at least 30% cocoa solids. I always end up grabbing dark chocolate (~60% cacao) but maybe that wasn't a good idea in this case since it may overpower the hazelnut flavor.

The preparation went without a hitch for the most part. After toasting the hazelnuts in the oven, I tried to remove the paper skins by rubbing them in a towel as recommended but it didn't work that well. I don't know if I didn't toast the nuts long enough (11min at 350 degrees) or they weren't fresh but the paper was just stuck to the nuts and not much came off. I just processed them with the paper on and proceeded with the recipe without much problem. Good thing I had that food processor lying around that I bought a few months ago to make cheesecake. And good thing I figured out how to use it, but only after fiddling with the lid for about 15 minutes and almost returning it because I thought it was broken. That was a case of RTFM.

I think the final result was a bit too chocolatey due to the dark chocolate. When I tasted the hazelnut steeped milk, it tasted nice and nutty but I didn't get enough of the hazelnut taste after adding it to the chocolate mixture.  It did taste slightly different from the regular chocolate ice cream I made last time but chocolate was the dominant flavor. The texture was nice and smooth and very silky. I need to make some ice cream without any chocolate next time or this recipe by Giada De Laurentiis. I'll have to revisit this recipe with milk chocolate instead. I was going to bring this batch to the office but I feel it didn't live up to my expectations so I will just share it with the family instead.


Hazelnut Ice Cream (Gianduja Gelato) Recipe
adapted from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop
Ingredients
1.5 cups hazelnuts, toasted
1cup whole milk
2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
4 oz milk chocolate, finely chopped
5 large egg yolks
1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract.

Abbreviated instructions:
1. Toast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet at 350 degrees F for 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature and then rub in a dry, clean kitchen towel to remove the papery skins. (Did not work for me.) Chop fine in a food processor.
2. Warm milk, 1 cup of cream, sugar and salt. Remove from heat and add chopped hazelnuts and steep for 1 hour.
3. Heat 1 cup of cream until just before boiling. Add to chopped chocolate in another bowl. Mix until blended.
4. Strain hazelnut infused milk into another saucepan squeezing as much milk out as possible. Heat milk and add to egg yolks to make custard. Cook until thickened.
5. Add custard to milk and chocolate mixture and cool in refrigerator for 6-8 hours. Churn in ice cream maker per manufacture instructions.