Why should chocolate ice cream be made with real chocolate?


June 2019

by Tobias Sudhoff

Real chocolate ice cream should be made with real chocolate, not chocolate powder and additives. The use of industrial cacao powder & cheap plant based fats makes every chocolate ice cream taste the same. Instead of expressive flavours I get mostly uninspiring and tasteless concoctions. Ice cream makers should finally return to the semantics of chocolate to create more pleasure and better quality food in ice shops as well.


Pleasure seems to be a much more political affair than we connoisseurs would wish for. In a time of abundance when noon is fighting hunger here, more questions are asked about quality, sustainability, ecology and social issues. So in recent years, more small & medium-sized, craft-based manufacturers are emerging, which embrace the Zeitgeist and return to small, high-quality and more sustainable production.


This development is good news for connoisseurs. As a cooking activist, I describe these with the term "food change", because a sustainable way of life simply enhances our quality of life!


This article will not go into the depths of why chocolate is real food and in its ancient origins were referred to as “food of goods”, because I want to explore instead the joy of real chocolate in the production of ice cream.


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SO HOW DO YOU PRODUCE REALLY GOOD CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM?

Artists. They compose, abstract and anticipate their work in advance to get to the highest standards. They master their craft, their instruments, their brush. Good chocolate for me is an art, so allow me to set the highest standards here.
Chocolate ice cream today is an iced cream based on milk, cream, egg yolk and chocolate flavours, which are cooled down and frozen to ice at certain temperatures.

Thanks to Mr. Karl von Linde - exactly, the guy who invented the refrigerators - we all can enjoy ice cream today at an industrial scale. As a result of industrialization, we now have an uninspiring mush instead of individual, expressive chocolate ice cream varieties. You see this when you look at the latest test magazines, in which chocolate ice cream varieties are hardly different from one another sensorially. The base for milk ice cream is a mix of sugar and cocoa powder. Sometimes, milk fat is replaced by vegetable fat (which is cheaper) and the German magazine Öko-Test shows: In almost every chocolate ice cream we find additional binding and aroma substances. Instead of trusting full flavours of chocolate and craftsmanship! This must send shivers down every passionate cook's spine.



Cocoa mass (we are not even talking yet about cocoa powder!), is the preliminary stage of production to chocolate. Sure, everything is already there. But that does not have much to do with the chocolate itself. You would not come to think that paint & canvas are art by itself, would you?

No one would pay millions for a bit of canvas and some oil paint, but when a smart mind like Picasso makes it meaningful, it becomes great art. And so processing, conching of raw products, grinding movements, the degree of conchature grinding, speeds, shear and torsional forces - all these complicated, fuzzy-logical elements - are the basis for the art-piece of "Chocolate". Only at the end of the process, when cocoa butter and cocoa mass are united in a melt - only then chocolate gets its semantic content! Only then, the artwork on the canvas is finished.

And for exactly that reason, chocolate ice cream makers should finally return to the core meaning, the semantics of chocolate. To share an artistic sense in their ice cream. And in turn, some of these artificial additives become unnecessary, as the aroma`s from chocolate are completely sufficient. An ice cream producer who really understands this, uses melting and crystallization behaviour of the chocolate for the optimal structure of ice cream.

Real chocolate ice cream is made from real chocolate! Not from cocoa powder and additives!

And everyone who ever has experienced this kind of chocolate ice cream knows what I’m talking about. You can literally feel the passion of the taste-creating artist!
If we want to change this world for the better, then we need to give it our passion, an unconditional surrender to taste and love to a pleasurable life. Because not the virtual world, not the additive-contaminated substitute satisfactions, is what makes our lives worth living. Rather, it is a perception of this wonderful world with our own senses. For our senses, if only really consciously used and trusted, tell us everything about the wonderfully sensual world out there.

Our Virunga 70% is perfect for 
making chocolate ice cream

Hints of morello cherries, earthy chocolate and black tea are revealed as the rare Virunga melts in your mouth. The depth  of a rare Amelonado cacao embodies the last mountain gorillas that inhabit  Virunga National Park.