Recipe Notes: Chocolate Semifreddo

19 June 2018

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, May 2018

What a tempting recipe for a hot summer! A frozen chocolate dessert that is made without the churn used to make ice cream, indeed no special equipment at all is needed. Semifreddo translates from Italian roughly as "half frozen" and it is expected to be lighter than ice cream. 

Bittersweet chocolate was chopped fine and set aside, as was a mixture of vanilla extract with instant espresso powder. Eggs, sugar, and salt were whisked together. In a sauce pan, heavy cream and water were heated to simmering then whisked into the egg mixture. The resulting mixture was then heated to 160° then poured through a strainer over the chopped chocolate. After the chocolate had melted it was whisked until smooth and the vanilla espresso mixture was whisked in. Heavy cream was beaten to soft peaks, one-third of this was mixed into the cooled chocolate mixture to temper it  before the remaining whipped cream was gently folded into the chocolate. The mixture was transferred to a loaf pan and frozen. Total preparation time was about one hour.

Like chocolate mousse, which you might view as a lighter version of chocolate pudding, whipped cream is folded into a chocolate mixture to lighten it. The chocolate semifreddo was easily imagined by us to be a frozen mousse. It was creamy, easily eaten while frozen, but not as rich as ice cream or gelato. It was a nice dessert, easily made, that we enjoyed eating, but in the future we will probably stick to ice cream when craving a frozen, chocolate dessert for a hot summer day.