Ice cream without the cream

Ever since Brian and I went off dairy for most purposes in 2018, we've been trying to find a reasonable dairy-free alternative to ice cream. You can, of course, buy nondairy frozen desserts, and we've tried several, but we never found one we loved enough to justify the fairly substantial price tag. And the homemade versions we've tried, such as iced coconut milk and plum whip, didn't quite satisfy that ice-cream craving. They were cold and sweet, but they didn't have the creamy smoothness of the real thing. 

So, this week, Brian decided to go for broke and try making a frozen dessert from coconut cream. This stuff is much richer than coconut milk, with around 83 grams of fat per cup, putting it roughly on a par with heavy cream—and it's even higher in saturated fat than real cream. So this vegan dessert would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a healthy alternative, but he wasn't going for healthy; he was going for satisfying. If the recipe succeeded in giving us the creamy texture we wanted, we could always tweak it later to see how much we could lower the fat content without losing that smoothness.

Another thing Brian thought might help with the texture would be to add more sugar. As a trained chemist, Brian knew that having sugar dissolved in a liquid inhibits the formation of ice crystals, which might prevent this dessert from turning into a solid block of ice the way our iced coconut milk did. The problem there was that the original iced coconut milk recipe was already a bit on the sweet side for me, and adding more sugar would probably make it outright cloying.

However, he thought of a work-around for this problem. We happened to have a container of allulose sweetener in our pantry, left over from my carb-counting period. Allulose is a naturally occurring sugar, but the body doesn't absorb it like other sugars. Thus, it has about two-thirds of table sugar's sweetness with only one-tenth of the calories, and it doesn't spike your insulin levels. Brian figured that by replacing sugar with allulose and scaling up the amount by 50 percent, he'd get roughly the same level of sweetness in a more sugar-saturated solution.

So, Brian took the original coconut milk ice cream recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie and began making modifications. First, he scaled it down by about one-third to fit our new, smaller ice cream maker. Then he replaced the coconut milk with coconut cream and the sugar with allulose. And last, he added cocoa powder to temper the coconut flavor and keep it from being overpowering. 

After mixing up this base and chilling it overnight, he put it in the ice cream maker and turned it on. And it didn't take him long to notice that this coconut-cream mixture was behaving differently from the original coconut-milk base. Not only was it not forming ice crystals, it didn't seem to be freezing at all. It had a fairly thick, smoothie-like texture when it went into the ice cream maker, and after half an hour of mixing, it still had that same smoothie-like texture. Only around the very edges of the bowl did it show any signs of solidifying.

But he wasn't prepared to give up yet. Remembering that the coconut-milk ice cream had turned from a soft-serve consistency to a solid block once he put it in the freezer, he decided to do the same with this mixture. And after a full day of freezing, he discovered that it had indeed firmed up—and in the right way. Instead of freezing solid like the coconut milk, it had developed a smooth, scoopable texture, very similar to a high-fat premium ice cream. And, as we'd hoped, it was almost perfectly smooth, with no detectable ice crystals.

The flavor was pretty good, too. Naturally, it was very coconut-forward, but the distinctive bittersweet note of the cocoa balanced out that nuttiness. The level of sweetness was just about right. Brian described the flavor as having a "bright" note from the coconut milk, but I couldn't detect it. I did find the taste a little on the salty side, but that's easily explained by the fact that Brian couldn't figure out how to reduce the eighth of a teaspoon of salt from the original recipe to one-twelfth of a teaspoon, so he'd just left the amount unchanged. If he took it down to an imprecise pinch, I think the flavor would be just about perfect.

So, on the whole, I'd say this iced coconut cream is our most successful vegan ice cream to date. We'll most likely continue to fiddle with the recipe and see how much of the coconut cream we can replace with soy milk to tone down the richness while still keeping it as smooth as possible. Also, next time we might try skipping the ice cream maker, which didn't seem to alter the texture much, and just putting the coconut-cream base straight in the freezer. But I think the recipe in its current form is good enough to be worth posting in full:

ICED CHOCOLATE COCONUT CREAM

• 1 cup coconut cream
• ⅓ cup allulose
• Small pinch salt
• 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
• ½ tsp vanilla
• ¼ cup soy milk

Mix all ingredients in a saucepan and heat until allulose is dissolved. Refrigerate mixture overnight, then chill in an ice cream maker for half an hour. Freeze until solid.  

According to the recipe tool from My Fitness Pal, one-quarter of this recipe (a smallish scoop) contains 128 calories, 13 grams fat including 10 grams saturated fat, 19 grams carbs including 1 gram fiber and 1 gram sugar, and 2 grams protein. However, most sources indicate that the carbs from the allulose shouldn't really count toward the total, so really the carb count for this dessert is only about 2 grams—low enough for even keto dieters.