Adventures in Vegan Ice Cream

One thing that really sucks about vegan food is that all non-dairy ice cream is expensive and most of it is not very good. The exception to the rule is Trader Joe's, which sells Double Rainbow's product under its own label at a reasonable price. The So Delicious coconut milk ice creams are good, but at Harris Teeter they are $6.79 a pint.  A PINT.  Come on.  That's crazy talk.

So, we've had this Cuisinart ice cream maker since we got married ten (!) years ago.  I'm pretty sure I used it a total of two times to make regular ice cream at some point in the distant past.  A few months ago, I tried a Veganomicon recipe for vanilla ice cream but I doubled the recipe and it was too much for the ice cream maker and never froze.  Then I tried another vegan vanilla ice cream and it was really icy, very disappointing.  This left me sort of turned off to the whole idea.  I kept seeing all these references to people supposedly making delicious vegan ice cream, though, so I decided to give it one more chance.

The recipes in Vegan Diner call for xanthan gum, which you can buy in a tiny bag that costs $9 at Whole Foods.  This is another reason I'd been avoiding homemade ice cream.  But finally I bit the bullet and picked some up - it's supposed to help with the creaminess factor, which can be difficult to achieve with vegan ice cream. Once I got it home I figured out that there's enough xanthan gum in the package for 480 batches of ice cream - you only need 1/4 tsp per batch.  So that will probably last a while.

Anyway.  The first kind I made was the Vegan Diner recipe for peanut butter chocolate chunk ice cream.  And then I completely freaked out because it was AWESOME.

Creamy and rich and so, so delicious.  You would never know it was vegan, which is a major goal of my ice cream quest.

The next kind I made was Vegan Diner's vanilla.  Except not, because there were some issues.  She calls for full fat coconut milk and I got it all ready to go and discovered I only had lowfat.  So I substituted soy creamer, but I didn't have quite enough soy creamer and had to use extra soy milk to make up the difference.  Also, I forgot to add the xanthan gum.  I did mix in some cherries and it was pretty good the first day, but once it froze up it was icy and not worth finishing.  Fail!

I learned my lesson, though, about playing around with ice cream recipes before I actually know what I'm doing.

The next recipe I tried was the Mean Green Pistachio from Hannah Kaminsky's book Vegan Desserts (which is beautiful and full of amazing things, by the way).

This one was excellent.  It's pistachios ground into butter, an avocado for greenness and creaminess, tofu, soy milk, agave, vanilla... maybe some other things I forgot.  She didn't call for xanthan gum but I put some in anyway - what else am I going to do with it?

So far the common theme in the two we've really liked have been the addition of nut butters (and the avocado in the pistachio one), which I think have helped to keep it creamy.  I'm going to try a different recipe soon that is more basic - I want a good vanilla! - so we'll see how that goes.