Vegan ice cream and frozen desserts

I spent a lot of last winter devising vegan ice cream recipes: mostly to put together a recipe book for our niece for Christmas, but also for our own use.  Why?  Although we're not vegan, we've cut back a fair bit on dairy consumption in recent years for the sake of our neighbours who are most at risk from climate change.  Dairy products are nothing like as bad for the climate as meat, but they're a lot worse than eggs or plant-based protein so we try to restrict them a bit.  Also, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable about all I'm hearing about the treatment of bobby calves in the dairy industry, and do wonder from time to time about giving up dairy entirely.

The internet is full of vegan ice cream recipes - however, I wasn't that satisfied with them.  Most are based on either bananas, coconut milk or cashew nuts.  Both bananas and coconut milk have quite strong flavours - that's fine if those are the flavours you're after, but they do limit your options.  And cashew nuts, as well as being quite expensive, are hard to work with.  If you want a smooth product, you have to soak the nuts, blend them to a paste, then force that paste through a cloth.  I've never actually tried it so I could be wrong, but that sounds like very hard work!

So I wondered, could you make ice cream using relatively-flavour-neutral soy milk?  It turns out you can, although I haven't found anyone on the internet publishing such recipes.  The trick is to add neutrally flavoured oils to bump up the fat content, then add soy lecithin (a natural emulsifier) to get the milk and oil to mix.  Turns out it works a charm!

rose geranium ice cream, chocolate ice cream and vanilla soy gelato - neapolitan ;-)

Making an ice cream recipe vegan

There are a few vegans in my life and I enjoy making ice cream so I've been on a quest to learn how to make vegan ice cream.

Most recipes on the internet seem to be one of the following:

• based on banana;
• based on coconut milk;
• based on cashew nuts.

The first two have the draw-back that your 'creaminess' comes from an ingredient with a strong flavour of its own.  That's often fine, but sometimes you want chocolate ice cream that's just chocolate, not chocolate-and-banana or chocolate-and-coconut.  And cashew ice cream relies on straining thinned-down cashew butter through cloth, which is pretty hard work!  I wondered if I could do better...

Cream and milk are just mixes of fat, water and protein with a smidge of emulsifier to hold them together; egg yolk is fat and water with lots of emulsifier and the kindof proteins that thicken nicely on heating.  Could I make vegan substitutes by simply mixing vegan fats, water, protein and emulsifiers in similar proportions?  Turns out I could and the results were great!

vegan rose geranium ice cream, vegan chocolate ice cream and vegan vanilla gelato :-)