After my nutritionist talked about making homemade raw vegan Ice Cream, I immediately started looking for the perfect raw vegan ice cream recipe. Most of the recipes called for a lot of ingredients, ingredients that either took to long to make or were expensive, and weren’t ideal for me. Some recipes were just too thick, or too thin, or called for coconut meat or too many cashews. This left the ice cream tasting altered or wasn’t the ideal consistency.
So what is my ideal ice cream? Let’s start with the base of the ice cream. There are many different kinds of bases for ice cream. I have tried coconut, almond, and cashew based ice creams from the supermarket. Once the cashew based ice cream hit the market, this was by far the best ice cream base. I also wanted a recipe that was creamy when melted, but not too creamy where it’s too thick or inconsistent when turned into ice cream. I wanted an ice cream where I do not have to officially make any nut milks or require extra time to prep like almond milk and coconut meat take. I wanted an ice cream that was sweet and the sweetener to be easily kept as a staple. Blending dates would make the batter chunky and coconut nectar is extremely expensive. Raw agave in this case is very cheap and easy to have on hand. The ice cream recipe should also be able to easy to scale without using super tiny measurements, and the recipe shouldn’t have a huge list of ingredients either. An ideal ice cream recipe is one that can also be made easily in batches, yet be really high in quality.
After looking through dozens of recipes and trying a few, I decided to merge together and create a recipe that I feel is ideal and is easy to create based off of my logic and experience.
I used strawberries in this recipe and topped it off with walnuts.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups soaked cashews rinsed and drained
- 1 cup water
- 1/2 cup raw agave syrup
- 1/4 tsp Himalayan salt, to flavour
- 1/2 tbsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup - 1 cup of toppings (optional), strawberries or chocolate chips are good
Instructions
- Make sure to freeze your ice cream bowl 12 hours prior to starting.
- Soak cashews for at least two hours. This helps remove the phytic acid and makes the cashews creamier when blended. You can use more than 1 1/2 cup to make the ice cream batter thicker.
- Rinse and drain cashews and toss in blender.
- Add 1 cup of water (less or more depending on your preference on consistency).
- Add 1/2 cup of agave along with 1/4 tsp of Himalayan salt and 1/2 tbsp of vanilla extract.
- Blend in high speed blender until smooth and creamy, if batter gets too warm, let it cool off before blending more. You should have a very creamy consistent batter. If batter is warm, freeze for 5-10 mins to cool of quicker (use mason jar if need be) or place in refrigerator for a few hours, this will reduce time in the ice cream machine. You will want the batter to be really cold before you put it in the ice cream machine.
- Remove ice cream bowl from freezer, rinse out with cold water and drain upside down (don't dry with towel) and place in your ice cream machine with the paddle. Rinsing the bowl removes and debris that might have gotten in the bowl and frozen.
- Turn on ice cream machine and pour batter in ice cream machine slowly to ensure the batter doesn't freeze or chunk up on the side.
- Let ice cream machine run for at least 30 minutes or more depending on your choice of consistency.
- If your toppings should be mixed in the ice cream, place them in 5 minutes before your ice cream is finished.
- When done, turn off the machine.
- Grab a bowl and start scooping the ice cream in. Keep quite so you have more ice cream to yourself from the family. And then, dig in and enjoy! Don't hesitate, just enjoy it!