ice cream

There's a theme in life, when it comes to making things, especially food, but most things. That if you do it yourself, you find that it's not only doable, the results also surpass what is available for purchase. I assume this wasn't always the case, but consumer enshitification; engineering products to maximize profits e.g. shelf life over taste and quality, mean its not hard to out do anything you can buy.

I tend to lean towards bitter things, dark chocolate (>= 85%), coffee with a small amount of oat milk, etc. And as I don't buy any manufactured food, I don't passively consume the amounts of sugar many do. If I am going to consume sugar I want it to really count, I want it in cake or ice cream or something else that is clearly desert.

I also have two children who are, season be damned, obsessed with ice cream. And that's the story of my starting to make my own ice cream.

Most commercial non dairy ice creams available to me are coconut based, and so was my first recipe. Coconut milk or cream are easy to come by and its a smooth high fat product, though its not for me. I then started to work with a cashew base and developed a rather good chocolate ice cream, in fact it's damn good. After finding something that worked, I continued to experiment, some were dismal failures, others happy accidents. I now have a base recipe that is delicious and flexible enough to make a variety of ice creams.

This is a lower sugar and fat content than most commercial ice creams and it doesn't have any of the stabalizers that are commonly used so it will freeze hard. You just need to take it out of the freezer about 10 minutes before you want to consume.

base recipe

This makes roughly a liter of ice cream.

You can either cold or hot soak the cashews, for the base recipe, a cold soak is easier as you want to mix to be cold before churning. A hot soak is easy if you want to help chocolate into the mix. Depending on the power of your blender, you can potentially reduce the soaking time but generally a cold soak takes a couple hours and a hot soak as little as 20 minutes.

Once your cashews are soaked, stick all the ingredients into your blender and blend blend blend. I do a full minute with a powerful blender. Then put the mix into the fridge to cool down before putting it into the ice cream maker. The mix should be fully cooled down before using for best results. And yes, I put olive oil in ice cream, fresh zesty extra virgin, the best I can find, it tastes great.

With the base recipe, you can basically try whatever you like, either adding one or two ingredients or replacing the liquid with something with its own flavour.

chocolate

Use a hot soak, then you can put the warm mix into the blender and put the chocolate in whole and the blending will create an emulsion.

orange chocolate

coffee chocolate

vanilla

cold brew

kombucha

raspberry

maple

malt

strawberry

chocolate malt

🏷️ #others #food #ice cream #low sugar #diy #vanilla #maple #malt #kombucha #coffee #chocolate #cookbook #vegan #EVOO