Recipe: Raspberry, Soy and Coconut Ice-cream

This recipe comes more or less directly from Veganomicon, with a little extra verbiage from me.  I’m afraid you do need a blender and an icecream maker for this – I suppose in a pinch you could put everything through a sieve and do the thing where you beat your freezing icecream every hour or so as it freezes, but that is honestly a real pain in the neck. I’d have to be pretty strongly motivated to bother doing this without appliances.

Incidentally, my apologies if this showed up in your reader twice.  I’m trying to pre-schedule posts, because this week is crazy from top to bottom, and sometimes I stuff up...

Your Shopping List

400g raspberries

1/4 cup water

15ml arrowroot or tapioca powder

2 tbsp + 3/4 cup caster sugar

1/2 cup coconut cream (put your can of coconut milk or cream in the fridge overnight, and use the thick part that rises to the top)

1 cup of soy milk (Bonsoy is nice – but whatever you go with, make sure it’s a soy milk whose flavour you don’t loathe, because you will taste it a little in the final icecream)

180g silken tofu

2 tsp vanilla extract

 

Now what will you do with it?

Put the raspberries, water, arrowroot and 2 tablespoons of sugar into a saucepan, and bring to a boil.  Cook gently for a few minutes, until thickened.  Let cool in the fridge for half an hour.

Put the raspberry mixture in a blender, along with all the other ingredients.  Blend until very smooth.  Refrigerate overnight.

Churn in your icecream maker according to the instructions, then pop in the freezer until you are ready to eat it.  Serve with those wonderful brownies, or eat in a cone.

Variations

Any berry would work here, of course, and I bet you could do lovely things with pureed apricots or plums, too.  Or you could skip the raspberries and  just go with vanilla, though I’d add a bit more vanilla extract in that case – or better still, scrape the seeds out of a vanilla pod and let it infuse in your blended mixture overnight.   I’m also plotting a fresh mint version of this with chocolate chips – if it works, I’ll post the recipe.

I’d be curious to see what this tasted like if one skipped the soy milk entirely, and just put in more coconut milk or cream.  I’d be tempted to add some citrus zests to prevent it all from becoming cloying, but I suspect it would be rather good.