🍨 HOMEMADE VEGAN DOUBLE CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM 🍨

amy-goodrich (70)in #vegan • 2 years ago

PXL_20211028_091445416.PORTRAIT.jpg

Merry Christmas steemit! I hope you all had a great time with family and friends and are getting ready to welcome the new year in less than a week.

Not sure what you are having as a vegan New Year dessert? Why not try my vegan double choc ice cream?

After a few tryouts and a few big failures, I made scoop-able, vegan ice cream that is so good that you have to stop yourself from eating the whole box.

The only problem I still have is that I don’t have an ice cream scoop to make my ice cream picture perfect. I did my best to make beautiful scoops with the tools I have, being regular table- and teaspoons. Though this didn’t work out that well, the ice cream was scoop-able and super yum! That’s what matters most, right?

While I am super happy with the result that doesn’t mean my ice cream experimenting stops here. Next, I want to try other flavors, add-ins, and different non-coconut plant milk bases.

PXL_20211028_091429329.PORTRAIT.jpg

HOMEMADE VEGAN DOUBLE CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM

My first tryouts all had a nice flavor but they were rock hard and unscoopable and melted very fast too.

After doing some research online, I found an article about why making vegan ice cream is so difficult compared to dairy ice cream. Though they didn’t mention any recipe, these people owned a vegan ice cream business and kinda knew what they were talking about!

In the article, which I kinda lost and can't find back to share with you, they talked about how nut milk contains too much water and not enough fats and proteins.

They mentioned that to make their commercial ice creams creamy and scoop-able, they use coconut oil and pea protein. Amongst other ingredients, they did not talk about. However, this made me think.

Compared to my first recipes, what did I do differently to come to a scoop-able result?

Well a few things to be honest

I added coconut oil and corn starch
This time I also heated the mixture and cooled it in the fridge for many hours before transferring it to the freezer
I added more sugar in the form of raw cane sugar and maple syrup (apparently sugar also improves the texture of the ice cream)
I added raw cacao powder to add some delicious bitterness as I don’t like overly sweet ice creams (hence why I almost used no sugar in my first recipe)

Ingredients (makes about 1 liter)

825 ml (28 fl oz. or 3.5 cups) coconut cream
Pinch of Himalayan pink salt
¼ cup extra virgin coconut oil
⅓ cup raw cane sugar
⅓ cup maple syrup
3 T corn starch
½ cup cacao powder
2 tsp vanilla extract
½ to ⅓ cup vegan dark chocolate chips

Directions

Add the cornstarch to ½ cup coconut cream. Mix well and set aside.

Add the rest of the coconut cream to a saucepan. Heat about 1-2 minutes on medium heat while stirring. Do not let the mixture boil during the whole cooking process.

Add the sugar, honey, and pinch of salt. Stir until thoroughly combined. stir well and whisk in the cacao powder, then the cornstarch/coconut cream mixture we prepared earlier and the coconut oil

Heat until the chocolate mixture is thickened. This will take about 8 minutes. Again, make sure the mixture doesn’t boil and keep stirring.

Remove from heat. Allow to cool slightly. To make sure all the corn starch and cacao powder are completely dissolved and to fluff up the recipe, mix with a hand mixer for a minute or two.

PXL_20211025_014154445.PORTRAIT.jpg

Before pouring the mixture into a container, stir in the vanilla extract. Cool in the fridge for 4 hours.

NOTE: If you have an ice cream maker you can probably add the mixture to your ice cream maker when it has cooled completely.

If you don’t have an ice cream maker, make sure to cool it for 4 hours in the fridge before transferring it to the freezer.

When you take it out of the fridge it will have a chocolate mousse consistency. A skin will have formed on top but that’s ok. Just give it a good stir before adding the chocolate chips. Smoothen the top out and transfer to the freezer to harden.

Though the ice cream already has a soft-serve consistency when you transfer it to the freezer, I still stirred it every 40 minutes to let it cool/freeze gradually. I did this for 3 hours. Then I let it freeze overnight.

Just before serving take out the ice cream for a few minutes and scoop it into bowls. If you have a decent scoop you can probably scoop it straight from the freezer.