Recipe Coconut raspberry ice cream

LissaC

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One of the reasons I wanted to delve into cooking is to deal with my sugar addiction. I love sweets. Cooking my own sweets allows me to control how much sugar I eat. So I got on this quest of trying to make creamy, less sugar-y ice cream at home, lactose free if possible. This ice-cream ticks all the boxes.

Because I don't like having to deal with leftover egg whites, I'm also trying to stay away from custard bases. So no eggs, few sugar, lactose free, how in the world can this ice-cream be creamy?! The secret is in balancing different types of sugar, fat content and of course stabilizers. After intensively studying The Underbelly blog tips I felt confident enough to create my own recipe.

- 125g fresh raspberry
- 400ml coconut milk
- 165ml coconut cream
- 20g honey
- 30g fructose
- 15g stevia powder
- 1 tablespoon vodka
- 1,5g xanthan gum
- 1,5g guar gum

1. Blend the fresh raspberry (personally I don't like it too liquid so I don't fully blend it)
2. With a spoon, mix xanthan gum and guar gum. This is to prevent the gums from clumping.
3. On a blender, get coconut milk, coconut cream, honey, fructose and stevia. Turn the blender on slow speed so that there is a vortex in the center of the mix and slowly add the gums into the vortex. Blend for 3 - 5 minutes in medium speed.
4. Get the mix in a pan in medium heat until it simmers, mixing every now and then.
5. Let the mix cool an add pureed raspberry and the vodka. If fat blobs form, blend the mix again, in the blender or using a stick mixer. Cover the mix with plastic film tightly over it. This is to prevent air from getting into the mix. Put it on the fridge overnight.
6. Churn and get your ice cream in the freezer. If you find that most ice-creams get icy in you freezer (like what happens in mine), cover your ice-cream tightly with plastic film on top of it (you can see it on the photo), close the box and store it inside a freezer bag. This helps preventing ice crystals from forming.

Notes on this recipe:
* If you remove the raspberry you'll find that this is a really good vegan ice-cream base. However, coconut does have a taste that is difficult to hide, and may not go well with all ingredients.
* Go full fat for the coconut milk and coconut cream. This ice-cream doesn't have much sugar, and part of the creaminess comes from the fat.
* Don't confuse coconut cream with creamed coconut, creamed coconut can have too much sugar.
* Gums are difficult to blend. Often they seem like they are blended but they're not, and you'll find small blobs of gum in the final product. You really must blend the mix for a couple of minutes so they incorporate well. And don't skip the step where you mix the gums together, this really prevents them from clumping.
* Using different sugar types keeps the mix creamy but not sugar-heavy. Fructose, corn syrup and invert sugar syrup are said to be especially helpful in keeping ice-cream creamy. Honey is helpful too but if you use it too much you will taste the honey in the final product. You can always stick to table sugar only but it will affect the texture.
* Something most ice-cream recipes don't tell you is that you need to work with the freezer you have. Your freezer can be your worst enemy. My freezer is a poor thing that gets icy very easily. Every single no-churn recipe I tried turned rock hard in my freezer. Store-bought ice-cream gets full of ice crystals in my freezer but it retains a good texture, because store-bought ice-cream is heavily stabilized so that it can stay creamy in domestic freezers. My ice-cream needs all the help I can give it staying creamy. And if I want to cut on the sugar and stay lactose-free, I need stabilizers.

Finally, if you want to work on your own ice-cream recipes, The Underbelly is really a good place to start. This article has everything you need to get you started.

I love coconut but it doesn't bond well with all ingredients and can be overpowering in some combinations, so I'm working on creating a good lactose-free base. It's all in the name of science :D
 
Thanks for all the tips. You have clearly been doing your homework and the ice-cream looks great. Talking of thickeners and stabilisers - have you thought of using mastic (or mastika). I believe its used in some Italian ice-creams which have a wonderful gooey soft texture.
 
Thanks for all the tips. You have clearly been doing your homework and the ice-cream looks great. Talking of thickeners and stabilisers - have you thought of using mastic (or mastika). I believe its used in some Italian ice-creams which have a wonderful gooey soft texture.

In Iran I had a very gooey ice-cream, later on this forum I learned it was probably made with mastic. Maybe they overdid it but I didn't enjoy the texture. I read some places in the south of Italy use cornstarch as stabilizer and that's one thing I haven't tried yet, some people complain they taste the cornstarch some people say they don't, but it's definitely one technique that got me curious, I have it in my plans to try with tapioca starch since the taste is milder.
 
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