Vegan Ice Cream Experiment #4
I made another attempt at a vegan ice cream, this time adapted from this Underbelly recipe. The ingredients I used are:
The main differences from the Underbelly recipe are:
(1) I bought cashew milk rather than making it myself. I used the Forager Project brand, which doesn’t contain any extra ingredients, aside from a little bit of oats and salt.
(2) I substituted 2.25g of locust bean gum for his recommended 2.25g of carboxymethyl cellulose, since I didn’t have that on hand. I recognized later that this is probably a failure, as the batch isn’t cooked, so the LBG won’t be activated.
(3) I substituted extra guar gum for his recommended 1.5g of gum arabic, since I didn’t have that either.
(4) Since I didn’t have either of trehalose (10g) or powdered glucose DE40 (60g), I substituted 70g of powdered glucose DE42.
(5) I increased the amount of sugar from 105g to 120g, since Underbelly often complains that most ice creams are “too sweet” (which is, obviously, wrong!) and I wanted to correct for it not being sweet enough.
I flavored it with my standard raspberry flavoring, which is made by buying a 340g bag of frozen raspberries and cooking them on low until they are nice and jammy. Then I used the stick blender to blend them all together. The deodorized/refined coconut oil was new to me, it doesn’t have the coconutty smell/flavor, so makes for a more neutral base.
This turned out more like a sorbet than the ice cream feel I’m going for, although the flavor was good. I’d like to try this recipe again, but with his recommended ingredients (all can be ordered on Amazon), and think about how to make it creamier (maybe more inulin?). The addition of inulin was something I wouldn’t have come up with myself, but Underbelly recommends it as a way to add a creamy “mouthfeel” without the milkfat, even though inulin is a starch and not a fat.
