Whether you’re vegan, trying to avoid dairy for other reasons, trying to follow a healthier diet overall or just watching your calories, if you also love ice cream, you’ve likely wondered how you can make ice cream at home, using fruit as your base.
Most dairy-free ice cream recipes will point you to bananas (remember when there was the whole “nice cream” craze?). In fact, some fruit-based ice cream recipes use bananas and that’s literally it, the only ingredient. Just freeze some bananas, throw them in a blender and you’re done.
However, despite their popularity, you don’t have to rely solely on bananas for your next foray into frozen fruit “ice cream.” There are other fruits out there that, when combined with just one or two other ingredients, make a perfectly delicious substitute for traditional ice cream, no bananas required.
Peaches
If your go-to flavor of ice cream is peaches and cream anyway, then you’ll want to try your hand at making ice cream from purely peaches. Just like you might when you would make banana-based “ice cream,” you’ll want to use frozen peaches in this instance as well.
Blend them with a liquid and sweetener of your choice (about a half a cup of liquid for every pound of frozen produce) to get the right flavor and consistency. Try a creamy, dairy-free option like coconut milk for your liquid and then let the mixture freeze, as this recipe suggests.
Mixed Berries
Another similar approach uses frozen mixed berries combined with, again, dairy-free milk and a sweetener of choice, blending it all together in just a few minutes before letting the mixture freeze. Go crazy and add in some chocolate chunks and you have a decadent dessert that’s as eye-catching as it is delicious.
This recipe recommends using one part liquid for every four parts frozen berries.
Avocados
When you have avocados lying about, once they’re ripe, you’ve gotta use them — fast. If you’re not in the mood for guacamole, try your hand at making some avocado ice cream. You won’t need a dairy-free milk option for this particular recipe, as it only uses avocado, water, honey and vanilla, and the recipe makes just enough avocado ice cream for one.
Mangoes
If you prefer the texture of soft-serve ice cream, you may have invested in an ice cream machine in the past. If so, break it out and make this mango-based ice cream recipe that uses coconut milk, sugar and nothing else for a simple, fruity take on soft-serve that’s vegan.
No ice cream machine? No worries. While you won’t be able to achieve quite the same texture without one, you can still make the ice cream sans ice cream machine, just by popping the blended fruit and coconut milk mixture into the freezer and stirring it on occasion.
