Wednesday 14 June 2017

Strawberry Cheesecake Ice-Cream



The ice-cream challenge continues. I have now used my ice-cream machine more than twice the number of times as the person who set me this challenge. This flavour was inspired by a strawberry cheesecake milkshake MrFodder had from the burger restaurant, 8-bit. I had a sip, and it was amazing. This ice-cream doesn't really do it justice, and so I am going to work on improving the recipe. The cheese flavour wasn't really strong enough, though it may be because I used lactose-free cream cheese. It was still delicious though!

Coles and Woolworths used to sell the Tofutti non-dairy cream cheese, but they don't seem to anymore, and I haven't been able to find it at any of the wholefood stores I've looked at (tried the CBD, Brunswick and Fitzroy, all the famous hipster places). In the end, I settled for Liddle's lactose-free cream cheese. My recipe is based off this vegan strawberry ice-cream recipe, as well as the Serious Eats vegan vanilla ice cream base.



Ingredients
400ml coconut cream
400ml soy milk
125g white sugar
80g dextrose
15g pea protein
3g xanthan gum
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250g cream cheese

250g strawberries - hulled, and diced
50g sugar

20g Nuttelex / margarine
80g speculoos biscuits, roughly crushed (or you can just use anything you'd use for a cheesecake base: digestives, graham crackers, gingersnaps)

Method
1. In a medium saucepan, whisk together the coconut cream, soy milk, white sugar, dextrose, pea protein, xanthan gum, and once it has mostly dissolved, heat over a medium-low heat while whisking until smooth and it comes to a gentle simmer. Put into another container and place in the fridge to cool for at least 4 hours.

2. In a small saucepan, over low heat, gently cook the strawberries and sugar. While it's cooking crush the strawberries with a fork, and it should eventually become a syrup (though it won't be smooth, but that's OK, it'll add texture to the ice-cream).

3. Melt the Nuttelex and add the crushed speculoos and stir to mix so the crumbs get coated. It doesn't matter if you have some bigger crumbs, it'll soften in the ice-cream.

4. Once the milk mixture is cool, blend together with the vanilla extract and cream cheese. Allow to cool for another 20-30 minutes - if you have an ice-cream machine that needs pre-cooling, now is the time to start.

5. Prepare the milk / cheese mixture in your ice-cream machine as instructed. About halfway through, drop in the speculoos mix (I ended up with about 15g leftover, which I saved for sprinkling over the ice-cream at the end). When it's done, spoon about a third of the ice-cream into the container, then drop half of the strawberry mixture, third ice-cream, last half of the strawberry, third ice-cream.


You should have a layer of ice-cream at the top, but if you have some leftover strawberry mix, feel free to add it to the top. Using a knife, or a spatula, start stabbing down into the ice-cream and swirling a bit, to distribute the strawberry mixture. Put in the freezer to harden into a scoopable state (a few hours / overnight). Though it's semi-scoopable in this state, so you can eat it right away!

We found that the ice-cream was really hard when pulled out of the freezer, but if you leave it out to soften (I know, we're heathens letting ice-crystals form in our ice-cream like that) for about 10 minutes, it does become scoopable.

I really like how it looks with the crumbs and strawberry distributed all over the ice-cream.


The recipe I used for the galettes above was from David Lebovitz. I just substituted soy milk for the milk, and Nuttelex for the margarine. I did include eggs though, as I think I may be growing out of my egg allergy! Something I discovered when making the sponge cakes. Here's to hoping!

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