Next in terms of my dairy free baking/cooking experiments here at Struan Farm is something frozen to serve with Chelsea Winter's fabulous "Crazy Italian Chocolate Cake." If you haven't tried baking that yet you must, seriously.
There are some great dairy free "ice creams" such as Duck Island and Little Island out there available in grocery stores, and we do purchase those when needed. But unless you're pressed for time, why not make your own?
My first experiment was "Mango Sorbet" from David Lebovitz' "The Perfect Scoop," my "go to" cookbook for ice cream/sorbet/frozen yogurt/sherbert recipes. I'd made his strawberry sorbet previously and it was excellent, as well as a number of the ice creams in the book (toasted coconut and honey lavender are favourites). I also thought the vibrant golden colour of the mango would look fantastic served with the dark chocolate cake. The recipe called for fresh fruit, but I decided to test frozen cut mango (thawed) to save myself the tedious job of cutting up 1 kg. of fruit and messing around with those pits. This strategy served me well. The recipe is otherwise quite simple with water, sugar and lime juice to taste.
This one's definitely a winner, hooray!
For my second experiment I decided to try a dairy free "Sweet Potato, Coconut & Peanut Butter Ice Cream" recipe from a recent issue of Nourish Magazine, the Australian one, not the local kiwi publication. I substituted orange kumara for their "sweet potato," which usually works just fine. It did. Unpeeled kumara are sprayed with oil and baked for an hour until soft, after which the cooled flesh is scooped out and mixed with coconut milk, peanut butter, maple syrup and vanilla bean paste before chilling and churning. The coconut flavour saves this one. It's not bad, but it's not something I'd write home about either. A dairy free person might be really happy with it, but I'd prefer a good fruit sorbet or the real deal myself if given the choice. I'll freeze it and see what the grandchildren think, but I suspect they'll prefer the mango sorbet.
I might look to see if there's a toasted coconut dairy free "ice cream" recipe out there, I'm thinking that could be good. But in the meantime fresh fruit sorbets are the ticket.
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