After almost 400 batches, I have perfected my homemade ice cream base. As a new challenge, I decided to try and develop a good vegan base.

The main challenge with homemade vegan ice cream is that it’s too hard. It’s a requirement for me that my ice cream has a “chewy” bite to it but is scoopable right out of the container, and every vegan ice cream recipe I’ve tried has needed to sit out for 10-20 minutes to become soften enough to eat it.

The other challenge is flavor. Many bases, like the one in the Salt & Straw recipe book, rely on coconut milk or coconut cream. I love coconut, but it limits the flavors you can make with that base because the coconut flavor is so strong.

So for my first attempt, I tried a Van Leeuwen recipe that I found online. It was intended to be mint chip, but I chose ube as the flavor so I could compare it to my regular ube, which I make all the time.

Ingredients:

  • 212g coconut milk (I used Thai Kitchen, unsweetened, canned, but next time I’d use the kind in a carton)
  • 212g cashew milk (I got Forage brand at Rainbow Grocery)
  • 150g sugar
  • 60g cocoa butter (bought as chips, in bulk, at Rainbow Grovery)
  • 60g coconut oil (bulk from Whole Foods)
  • 2g salt
  • 1 tsp. Ube extract (Butterfly brand)
  • ⅛ tsp. Locust bean gum and ¼ tsp. Guar gum (my additions)

The instructions are to put the sugar and 20g of water in a saucepan, stir it over low heat until melted. Then add the cocoa butter and coconut oil, let it melt. Finally, add the coconut milk and cashew milk, and hit it with the immersion blender. I added the ube extract at the end. This only made about ½ of my standard batch, so next time I would double it.

I was surprised to find that the cocoa butter flavor was very strong, like white chocolate. The texture was dense and hard and had to sit out for about 15 minutes to soften, but the mouthfeel was very creamy. Adam said “it feels like eating ice cream.”

Nevertheless, the cocoa butter flavor would have paired better with the mint extract (as the recipe intended). It was also just too hard, like an ice cream popsicle. I might try this recipe again, but add corn syrup or dehydrated glucose to try and soften it. I would also use mint instead of ube as the flavoring.