Espresso Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

Creamy, rich ice cream with a strong espresso flavor is flecked with just enough chocolate chips to make it a coffee-lovers frozen dream come true! For more espresso snacks, try my peanut butter espresso cookies and chocolate chunk espresso cookies.

I have an intense love for both coffee and ice cream, and I’m pretty much always consumed for a craving of one or the other. But sometimes I end up with a perfect storm of both. 

Recently I found myself in aforementioned dire straits in the middle of the workday and decided I would run to the store and grab a pint of Starbucks ice cream. I probably spent a good ten minutes checking and rechecking every shelf in the freezer section thinking that I’m clearly just missing it.

But no – there were no pints of ice cream, no tags where it might just be out of stock… nothing. I left the store, defeated, and headed to Starbucks to pick up a Frappuccino (since that would be the closest thing to the combination I so desired). It was fine, but it didn’t satisfy my craving. 

A week later the craving hit me again. I hopped online to see what stores carried it since logic would dictate that maybe it was just that store that stopped carrying it. What I found when I searched all over the internets is that Starbucks had stopped making the ice cream altogether. 

Um… what?

But… Coffee ice cream. Java Chip Frappuccino. What do you MEAN they stopped making ice cream? I felt heartbroken. Yes, I know other brands make coffee flavored ice cream – but none of them have ever seemed to have the right balance.

In that moment, I decided I had no other option than to make my own.

I recently bought a container of King Arthur Flour’s Espresso Powder to use in a brownie recipe I was working on, and that was exactly what I needed for this recipe. It’s the perfect grind, the perfect flavor, just… perfect.

Luckily, I pretty much got the proportions of the ingredients right on the first try (which almost NEVER happens, by the way). But after churning it and tasting a spoonful, I decided I wanted a little more espresso powder to give it a more intense flavor so I dropped in another tablespoon and churned it a little bit more. Normally I would load up my ice cream with chocolate chips, but the chocolate isn’t what I wanted to feature here. I wanted the chocolate to be a nice little complement to the espresso flavor. And it turned out exactly the way I wanted it to.

I also very much prefer my ice cream on the softer side, so I always do everything I can to keep it that way. My trick? Place the container of ice cream in a sealed Ziplock bag. It stays soft until the last scoop. Magic, I tell you! 

This ice cream could almost be described as gelato. While I can’t actually call it gelato because this is cream-heavy and it doesn’t have the necessary butterfat content, I can still say that it’s reminiscent of it. It’s rich, smooth, dense and has an intense espresso flavor. This might be my new favorite ice cream, surpassing Red Velvet.

 …might. Let me get back to you on that one after I polish off a pint of each.

After you’ve made this recipe, please leave a comment below with a rating – and if you came from Pinterest, add a photo to the Pin of what you make to the pin to share your experience!

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