Two Ice Cream Recipes, One With Dairy, One Vegan

Homemade Ice Cream

2 cups milk
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups 1/2 & 1/2
1 TBS vanilla
4 cups whipping cream

Heat the milk until it forms bubbles on the edges. Turn off the heat. Add the sugar and salt. Let dissole. Add the 1/2 & 1/2, whipping cram & vanilla. Freeze in your ice cream container for half an hour before churning.

Now here's the vegan one with a rambling narrative of course.

My very first try at casein-free ice cream was an utter disaster. So I stuck to buying the So Delicious brand for my son. While my son enjoyed it, it wasn't cheap. Plus it didn't have the creaminess of real ice cream.

Recently I did more research. I found an excellent vegan ice cream blog at veganicecream.blogspot.com.

This gave me a guideline for how to make vegan ice cream.

I then decided to convert my old dairy-filled ice cream recipe. It called for whipping cream and half and half. Since those ingredients weren't an option, I picked coconut milk for the fat content.

The ice cream doesn't taste like coconut milk. There is just enough coconut milk in it to give it a creamy texture.

I also added some soy margarine for extra fat. For those who can't have soy, I would replace the margarine with 1/4 cup safflower oil or 1/4 cup canola or an additional 1/4 cup of your milk sub.

My milk sub was vanilla almond milk which also contains soy. Any vanilla milk sub would be good. We are big fans of almond milk and it was on sale. So that's what we used.

So without further ado, here is the ice cream recipe.

Carolyn's World Famous Vegan Ice Cream

1 can coconut milk
2 cartons vanilla almond milk (You won’t use all the almond milk)
¼ cup Earth Balance margarine
1 ¾ cups sugar
½ tsp salt
1 TBS vanilla
6 TBS corn starch or 4 TBS arrowroot starch

Mix the coconut milk with enough vanilla milk to make 7 ¾ cups total. Reserve half a cup and pour the rest into a large saucepan.

Add the Earth Balance, sugar and salt to the saucepan with the milk.

Heat just until it starts to boil.

While the saucepan is heating, whisk the corn starch into the reserved half cup of milk.

As soon as the saucepan starts to boil, remove from heat. Add the corn starch/milk mixture and stir until dispersed throughout. The mixture should begin to thicken.

Add the vanilla.

Pour the ingredients into your ice cream freezer. Let cool completely before making ice cream according to your ice cream maker’s directions. It is very important to let it cool completely so you don’t end up with ice cream sludge.

Good luck keeping the rest of the family out of it.