Green Tea Soy Ice Cream

I scream, you scream, we all scream for – ah!  ice cream!  It makes the lactose intolerant cringe, the vegan shake their fist in.. disgust?  Jealousy?  And me, well, ice cream just makes me happy.

Substitutions is my favorite cooking game to play.  Let’s try to take the cream out of ice cream!  While we’re at it, let’s make it taste like green tea!  Why?  Because green tea ice cream is tasty.  That’s why.

Since matcha isn’t cheap, I looked around for a green tea soy cream online that I might be able to copy.  I couldn’t find such a thing, but I did find a great big handful of soy cream recipes with all sorts of other flavorings.  After reading through them, I got the basic ingredients down:

• soy milk/soy cream
• sugar
• a thickening agent
• an ice cream maker (duh)*

Okay, that’s simple!

Here are the ingredients!

2 cups soy milk

2 cups soy cream (or more soy milk, but it’s not gonna be as creamy)

3/4 cup sugar

2 Tbsp. arrowroot powder

2 Tbsp. matcha

1 tsp. vanilla extract

And here’s how we do:

Pour 1/4 cup of the soy milk into a little bowl.  Add in the arrowroot and whisk it all up.  This is an important first step because arrowroot doesn’t work like it should if it’s added directly to a boiling liquid.  So you need to mix it with something cooler first.  There’s science behind this!

You now have a slurry.  I don’t know about you, but nothing makes me hungrier than using the word “slurry”.

Add the matcha to this mixture, and whisk again. 

Now, add the rest of the soy milk, the soy cream, and the sugar to a big pot.  As soon as it starts to boil, take it off the heat.  Remember the slurry?  Now is when you mix it in.  The slurry, in all it’s scientific glory, is going to make your milk/cream/sugar mixture a bit thicker.  Not a lot thicker, it will thicken up more as it cools.  You can add the vanilla now if you want. 

 At this point, you have to be patient.  Set your pot on a counter top and let it cool down a bit.  Take a nap, read a book, pick your nose (but don’t forget to wash your hands before you start cooking again).  Once it’s room temperature, transfer the liquid to a lidded container and stick it in the fridge.  Go back to picking your nose.

It needs to be in the fridge for at least two hours to get nice and cool and ready for the ice cream maker.  But really, if you fall asleep or go out to a movie or something it wont hurt at all.

Last step!  Process the ice cream mixture in your ice cream maker for however long the instruction book says to.  Mine took about 25 minutes.

Eat!

Share with friends!  It makes a lot!

The only downside to this recipe is that once the ice cream is made and stored in the freezer, it gets pretty hard.  Not icy, just hard.  So before serving, you have to let it soften up in the fridge for about 30 minutes.

I have ambitions to try soy ice cream with silken tofu.  We’ll see how that turns out

– Ellen

* Okay you don’t really need an ice cream maker, but it sure does help.