Recipe: Vegan Ice Cream

Recently, after a particularly pizza-filled weekend, I woke up on a Monday to several friends gleefully announcing on Facebook the start of their cleanses. For those who don’t know they’re leading a filthy life, a cleanse is a short-term, strict diet that promises to rid the body of toxins. It sounds like a good idea until you realize that most cleanses consider caffeine and sugar to be toxins, not breakfast. While I would normally skip straight to the witty cat memes, this time I paused. My cleansing friends are all slender, with glowing skin and shiny hair. I am bloated, and my hair is frizzy, I thought, as I sipped on a latte made with a leftover Ted Drewes concrete. Perhaps a diet makeover really was in order.

Since you’re reading this column, you may have heard of that other food journalist, Mark Bittman. I love Bittman’s articles in the New York Times, so I bought his book VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health…for Good. Bittman suggests being a part-time (until 6 p.m.) vegan, but eating anything you want for dinner. While I don’t have the discipline to do a cleanse for even a few days, this VB6 concept seemed like a sustainable way to improve my eating habits. Especially if I could figure out how to make a vegan substitute for my favorite frozen treat.

I’d never made ice cream, vegan or otherwise, so research was in order. I learned that you first make a base, which is traditionally a combination of milk, cream, sugar, vanilla and eggs. The base is cooked on the stovetop, then poured into an ice cream maker, which churns the base as it freezes. Churning aerates the mixture, which keeps it from freezing into a hard block and helps prevent ice crystals from forming. If you want to add a flavor, say marshmallow fluff fruit, it’s poured into the ice cream machine during the last few minutes of churning.

I also learned that the secret to making a rich, creamy frozen confection is to use ingredients with a high fat content. If the velvety texture of Ben & Jerry’s Smooth Vanilla Ice Cream makes you sigh with happiness, you can thank the 16 grams of fat in every half-cup (as if we only eat half a cup – snort). A similarly-sized portion of my beloved frozen vanilla custard is practically a health food with its mere 10 grams of fat. For my vegan ice cream, full-fat coconut milk would give me the smooth texture I wanted, but could I justify the whopping 24 grams of fat found in just 4 ounces of it? Absolutely. According to Nutritionstripped.com, the fat found in coconut milk is mostly MCT (medium chain triglyceride), which is easier for our bodies to break down and use as energy than the standard fats found in dairy ice cream. If, like me, you must have frozen desserts, an ice cream base made from coconut milk is the way to go. I cooked a coconut milk base and poured it into my new ice cream maker. The kitchen gizmo cost less than $50, which is what my family spends on three trips to Chippewa Street, and a small price to pay for my new, imperfect vegan diet. With the ice cream churning happily, I contemplated flavors.

Blueberries are plentiful this time of year and taste light and refreshing. I was concerned that fresh blueberries would freeze into tooth-chipping rocks, so I cooked them down into a sauce. The blueberry sauce tasted sweet, but also a little boring. I recalled that Ernesto’s Wine Bar executive chef Jimmy Hippchen, a member of Sauce Magazine’s Ones to Watch class of 2014, once told me that when food tastes a little bland, it usually needs an acid. Hippchen was right; a splash of fresh lemon juice instantly brightened the blueberry sauce and made it more flavorful. If you want to be adventurous, a little white balsamic vinegar will do the same thing with more zing.

I’m now a few days into my VB6 experiment. Vegan breakfasts and vegetarian dinners are easy. Cheese-free lunches are a challenge. Fortunately, a spoonful of vegan ice cream satisfies my dairy cravings, and it tastes amazing in my latte.

Click here for the full recipe.