Vegan Recipe of the Month: Plum Whip

Last Wednesday, Brian and I went to a free outdoor concert of swing music in town. We sat on our camp chairs among a crowd of our neighbors and enjoyed the music and the sporadic attention of a frisky puppy belonging to a couple seated in front of us. Brian remarked that the one thing we could use to make the experience complete was some ice cream...and once he'd said it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. All through the concert and the walk back home. I kept feeling the urge for a scoop of something cold and sweet. 

Even when we got home, I couldn't shake the craving. We didn't have ice cream or any nondairy equivalent in the house, so I started hunting through the pantry and freezer looking for something I could whip up into a reasonable substitute. When I unearthed some bags of frozen pitted plums, I recalled the time we made homemade Dole Whip from frozen pineapple and coconut milk, and I wondered if it would be feasible to do the same thing with plums instead.

We had three different kinds of plums in the freezer, from our three plum trees: Mount Royal (blue), Opal (red), and Golden Gage (yellow). We chose the Golden Gage plums for this experiment, since they were generally the sweetest. We just tossed what looked like a reasonable volume into the blender, shook up a can of full-fat coconut milk, and dumped some in on top of the plums. Then we started pulsing the blender on the "grind" setting, trying to chop up this icy mixture. By repeatedly pulsing and adding more coconut milk and pulsing again, we eventually managed it to reduce it to a smooth slurry—thicker than a milkshake but more liquid than soft-serve ice cream. All told, we used about 10 ounces of frozen plums and 3/4 cup of coconut milk, and we ended up with enough plum whip to fill two of our little IKEA cups most of the way full.

The finished product wasn't quite ice cream. It wasn't as sweet, and it had an icier, less creamy consistency. But it was cold enough and sweet enough to scratch that ice-cream itch, particularly with a generous spritz of our favorite coconut whipped cream on top. As he polished off the last of his cup, Brian remarked, "I think we'll definitely be doing this again." (Next time, he thinks he'll start by blending all the coconut milk with a small amount of the frozen plums, then gradually adding more plums until it reaches the right thickness.)

This improvised plum whip is kind of the perfect summertime treat. It's simple and tasty. It requires only two ingredients—frozen plums and canned coconut milk—both of which we typically have on hand at all times. It's reasonably healthy, made primarily from fresh fruit with no added sugar. It takes only a few minutes to make. And it's suitable for pretty much any type of diet: vegetarian, vegan, raw vegan, paleo. With only about 16 grams of carbs per serving, it would even work on the strict low-carb diet that I'm (mercifully) no longer following. And for those who don't happen to have plum trees in their front yards, it would probably work with almost any frozen fruit: strawberries, blueberries, mango, or what have you.