Fresh Mint Chocolate Chip Gelato

Silky fresh mint chocolate chip gelato with ribbons of dark chocolate that doesn’t freeze up hard!

First, A Cautionary Tale about Planting Mint

When we moved into our house several years back, one of the first things we did was plant an herb garden. Because, yay, we finally had our own backyard. Unfortunately, having never planted my own garden before, I did not realize how invasive mint is. It grows like crazy! It spread from one tiny little plant to an area about 3 feet wide. Oh well, I thought at the time, that’s fine. It’ll all die off in the winter. And it did.

UNTIL SPRING. Early next spring, it was back with a vengeance! It grew like crazy into all the other plants in the area, growing between the stones in our pathway, and punching up through several bushes about 3 feet high by the middle of the summer. This is a little unfortunate, because the place we had initially used as the herb garden we’ve since replanted with rose bushes.

So that’s a little unfortunate for our rose garden plans – OR IS IT?! I could think of worse issues than an excess mint problem! Our entire family loves mint chocolate chip gelato. And now I have an excuse to make it every few weeks when the mint gets overgrown. I head out there with some kitchen scissors and a vendetta – and go on an absolute mint massacre, knowing that in about a week, it’ll be back to how it was before I cut it back. And then I can find other ways to use up all that mint. Salads. Couscous. Herb pie. Tea. Etc.

This is all a long way of saying that it’s become a habit for me to start making mint chocolate chip gelato pretty regularly in the summers.

So is this really a cautionary mint tale? I’ll let you decide that for yourself.

Ice Cream vs. Gelato

I’ve made both ice creams and gelatos and found that for mint ice cream, I prefer gelato because it feels a bit lighter than custard-based ice cream recipes – it’s a milkier, silkier feel than those rich and creamy ice creams. I save the custard bases other flavors. So I opted for a gelato here.

If you care, gelatos tend to rely on milk more than cream, so the fat content is typically much lower than in ice cream. They don’t usually use egg yolks. They also tend to have less air, making them denser and silker — whereas ice cream tends to be a bit richer and fluffier.

Hard Freezing: Gelato At Home

My recipe for mint chocolate chip gelato began with this very solid gelato recipe for stracciatella. Strong recommend. The only issue was that the gelato would freeze up hard within a day or so of making it. Once it froze hard, it was much less pleasant to eat, and even letting it defrost a bit was a mixed bag. It would still be hard in the center, and then too-melted at the edges. For me, that kind of killed it.

So I started playing around with the recipe and researching ways to keep the gelato soft despite our freezer’s best efforts.

Finding a Kid-Friendly Solution to Hard Ice Cream

The first solution I tried was an easy one. And it worked! I just added about a tablespoon of vodka (which has a lower freezing point). This fixed the issue right away, and you couldn’t taste the vodka. So if you don’t mind adding alcohol to your ice cream and you want to keep the calorie content a bit lower, you can stick closer to a traditional gelato recipe.

But . . . alcohol (even in very small amounts) wasn’t a great solution if our kids were going to be eating a potentially large quantity of mint chocolate chip gelato. So I started looking into alternatives.

I had read that a high fat content will make an ice cream less likely to freeze up hard. So I started by adding a bit of butter to the recipe to dramatically increase the fat content. It worked really well! Silky smooth ice cream that wasn’t hard at all. I slowly reduced the amount of butter until the ice cream was a bit less rich – and when I got a good fat content, I swapped out the butter for cream. It somehow feels a bit wrong to add butter to ice cream, yeah? But it made the experimentation phase much easier.

So this kids-version of at-home gelato has a relatively high fat content for gelato. It’s definitely at the higher side for a gelato, but not as high as you would find with ice cream. But, importantly, it still doesn’t taste super rich – it still has that milky feel because there is no custard base. Just a mix of milk and cream.

In Defense of Higher-Fat Ice Cream

I also wanted to mention – a higher fat ice cream is not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re going to enjoy something sweet, eating it with fat slows the rate at which your body absorbs the sugar and can prevent a big blood sugar spike. The fat also leaves you feeling more satiated. Plus, you’re avoiding the other additives that are commonly put in ice cream to keep it soft. Fat can even help with absorbing certain fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K)! So I call it a win.

Fresh Mint Chocolate Chip Gelato

The second change I made to that Stracciatella recipe I mentioned above was the obvious one – adding fresh mint! I’m the big Stracciatella lover in our family. But my husband and kids strongly prefer mint chocolate chip gelato. So I started with a recipe I loved, and transformed it into one they loved too.

So I began steeping the fresh mint leaves in hot milk. Stracciatella involves steeping the milk on its own to enhance the milky flavor – so by using the method in this recipe, you get both a stronger milk flavor and a good fresh mint flavor.

The other holdover from Stracciatella is that we don’t use chocolate chips – we drizzle chocolate into the gelato as it freezes, give you long ribbons and chunks of chocolate. Everyone agrees the ribbons are better, by the way. Because we add a bit of oil to the chocolate before we put it into the ice cream, it melts more easily on the tongue while eating ice cream – which means you taste the chocolate more than you would taste a chocolate chip. So you get a strong, intense chocolate flavor against the fresh milky mint flavor.

Now, on to the recipe!

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