Improving texture of yogurt based ice cream- stabiliser?

Question

I've made a test on a recipe for coconut-yogurt ice cream, and I need some thoughts on improving the texture.

It was churned using an industrial ice-cream maker. It is based on a recipe I found online, only difference is the online recipe contained cocount based yogurt (which I want to avoid). I really would like to use Greek yogurt and coconut puree for this recipe.

Recipe I used: 500 gr of Greek yogurt 300 gr of frozen coconut puree (boiron) 4 tbsp honey 200 ml of double cream

The taste is super nice, but it is rock hard and once melted turns into soup.

One option is to make an englaise base (which I'm kind of trying to avoid as all of our other ice creams are currently englaise based), another is to use a stabiliser (I'm just not sure which one...). I also thought of maybe using a mixture of glucose and sugar, or even trimoline...??

Thanks!!

Answer 1

It looks like, you have very large ice crystals forming. One thing I’ve noticed in the recipe is the sugar content is rather on the lower-end. Around 80 g from the honey and 36 g from the coconut paste. Almost 10% by weight. Normally what you expect is 15-20%.

The amount of dissolved sugar in the base will help lowering the freezing point.

Before crystallization can begin, the temperature of the melt must decrease below the freezing point. When the melt is a solution, the solute lowers that freezing point to an extent based on the nature of the solute. Freezing point depression, being a colligative property, is based on the moles of solute present in solution, not on the mass. Therefore, a gram of glucose (with about double the number of moles of sucrose) would lower the freezing point more than a gram of sucrose. Proteins, being very large comparatively, have no measurable effect on freezing point.

I would double the sugar content with either invert sugar (which glucose + fructose) or as the paper above hints glucose.