Strawberry Ice Cream Sundaes
Ice cream was the sugary thing I loved most during my sugar-fueled days, and, not surprisingly, it was the saddest thing for me to give up. So learning to make sugar-free ice cream was nothing short of a victory for me. Truth be told, I didn’t try sugar-free ice cream for my first two years of living sugar free. It just seemed too risky; I was afraid it would be a slippery slope that led me straight back to a Ben and Jerry’s bender. Also, after a lifetime of eating sugar morning, noon, and night, I wanted to train myself to eat, and to like, real food. Now that I’ve actually grown to love real food, I’ve started experimenting with making desserts, such as this delicious (if I do say so myself) ice cream. But the irony is that I no longer crave sweets. I’ll make a quart of ice cream and it will sit in the freezer for weeks because I forget it’s there. What!? Me? Forget about ice cream? This fact alone is evidence that miracles do happen.
I get my strawberries at a local farmstand because they’re so much sweeter than grocery store strawberries. I often hull them and freeze them and then I can make this ice cream whenever I want. You can also make this with frozen strawberries, or frozen mixed berries. You can serve the ice cream straight from the maker but it’ll be a bit soft. Note that after a few hours in the freezer, homemade ice cream gets really hard because it doesn’t have as much air in it as commercial ice cream. Just leave it on the kitchen counter for 10 minutes until it’s soft enough to scoop into.
On whipped cream—making it is so easy, and it tastes so much better than the stuff that comes in the cans, which is loaded with unnecessary ingredients, most notably: sugar or corn syrup. You can whip cream in a standing mixer or using hand-held beaters, or you can do it by hand using a wire whisk.
Makes about 6 cups of delicious creamy strawberries ice cream.
Takes about 10 minutes prep time, plus 2 plus hours churning and chillin’ time (the chilling time will be eliminated with frozen berries)
what you need:
— For the Ice Cream —
An ice cream maker
2 heaping pints strawberries (about 1¼ pounds), hulled and halved
3 cups heavy whipping cream
1 cup whole milk
¾ cup monk fruit or stevia
Juice of ½ lemon (about 1 tablespoon)
1 teaspoon salt
what you need:
— For the Nuts and Whipped Cream Topping —
1 cup thinly sliced almonds
1 pint heavy whipping cream
2 teaspoons monk fruit or stevia
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup thinly sliced almonds
What to do:
To make the ice cream, put all the ingredients in the jar of a blender and puree. (It’s okay if some of the strawberries aren’t totally pureed—that just means you'll have chunks of strawberries in your ice cream.) Chill the ice cream mix for at least 2 hours and up to overnight. (If you start with frozen berries, you can skip the chilling step.)
Pour the ice cream mix into an ice cream maker and churn until it looks like ice cream. Serve the ice cream slightly soft, straight from the machine, or transfer it to a big container with a lid and freeze to harden it up slightly.
Game changer:
Toast the nuts. Preheat the oven to 325 ºF while the ice cream is churning. Scatter the nuts on a baking sheet and bake them for 8 to 10 minutes, until they are golden brown and you can smell the toasty scent coming from the oven.
To make the whipped cream, combine the cream, Erythritol, and salt in a medium bowl and whip with electric beaters until it’s the consistency of loose whipped cream. (It’s better to under whip cream than over whip it. If you whip it too long, you basically churn the cream and it starts to look like butter. I like butter, but not on my ice cream.)