Vegan Choc-Banana Ice-Cream, Attempt 1

When I first heard of someone making ice-cream from just bananas and coconut milk, I was enthralled. Banana and coconut are two of my favourite ice-cream flavours, and combined together sounded like heaven. I've been making vegan ice-cream for a while now, and it's very coconut cream / milk based, because that's one of the best fatty dairy alternatives we have available, but the problem is that it leaves everything with a coconut taste (unless you mask the flavour heavily with something like chocolate or mint). MrFodder isn't as big a fan of coconut as I am, so I've been looking into ways to reduce the amount of coconut anything I use.

I'm told the banana coconut ice-cream didn't have a heavy coconut flavour because banana was the main ingredient.

It turns out you can make "ice-cream" from just blended frozen bananas. It doesn't quite have the same texture, especially if you try to re-freeze it, but it's close.

So my first attempt at making a banana-based ice cream involved substituting the coconut cream with blended banana.

My first attempt was:

342g banana, blended
400ml soy milk
50g xylitol
1 teaspoon cinnamon (way too much, I would go half next time)

It was an icy mess.

I could put it in the ice-cream tub:

But once I left it to freeze overnight, it was almost impossible to scoop out.

I think there was too much water, from the banana and from the soy milk, and too much solid from the bananas, so it needed a bit more milk.

Since I happened to have some overripe bananas, I thought I'd try choc banana ice-cream.

Ingredients
327g banana, ripe, blended
15g pea protein
600ml soy milk
30g dark chocolate (I used 99%)
115g xylitol
8g xanthan gum

Method
1. Whisk all the ingredients together in a medium-sized saucepan until the powdered ingredients are a bit lumpy. Heat over medium-low heat, while whisking, until chocolate is melted and it comes to a gentle simmer.
2. Remove from heat and put in the fridge for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.

It will look pretty thick:

3. Prepare according to your ice-cream maker's instructions. I put it in the Breville Smart Scoop on the second-hardest setting.

4. Unless serving right away, remove immediately from the ice-cream machine and freeze for at least 5 hours.

It has neither a strong chocolate nor a strong banana taste, which is a bit unfortunate, but it's OK tasting. It was quite smooth, but there's a weird aftertaste, which might be from the protein or the xanthan gum. Might try increasing the banana and reducing the milk next time.