The Vegan Scoop
Posted by Jane M on May 12, 2009 · Member since Feb 2006 · 373 posts
I just got this book today and I am completely blown away! There's got to be like 100 different recipes in here and every combo imaginable....can't wait to start making me some ice cream!!!!
what types of ingredients does it involve? I read some reviews for a different vegan ice cream cookbook - Vice Cream - and some people complained that it used a lot of unusual/expensive ingredients (like cashews and maple syrup). It looks pretty cool, though.
From what I've seen from the look inside on Amazon, it looks awesome. I know that Wheeler's ice cream tastes amazing at the store, so I'm sure the recipes in the book will taste great too. I wish I had an ice cream maker...
He does use a lot of arrowroot powder which depending where you get it can be real expensive. I found a bag of Bob's Red Mill arrowroot powder (same size as the little bags of flours and grains) at WF for the same price as those little jars they sell in regular grocery stores though. As for the rest of the ingredients most are pretty normal....but the man does have an imagination! For example there is a Wasabi Ice Cream I am dying to try and then the Chocolate Martini one....
hmm... arrowroot is actually reasonably cheap (in bulk) in my area (Japanese markets... dunno what it's used for in Japanese cuisine.) But, I shall wait for the reviews...
I made the Maple Walnut ice cream from this book and it was delicious - it went REALLY quickly! I made the Choc Chip Cookie Dough one at the weekend, though, and I'm sad to say that the cookie dough measurements were WAY off.
It said that 1/2 cup butter was 225g, which is about twice as much as it should be. Even using half the amount of butter shown in the recipe the result was pourable, like cake batter and nothing like the stiff dough that was implied. I'm so thankful I didn't use the stated 225g!!!
I added another three cups of flour to the mixture to get it to hold together enough to form little balls... so, with so much extra flour it no longer tasted sweet and I ended up with so much cookie dough mixture I had to throw loads away. I hope I have better luck with other recipes because that one definitely has some typos in the quantities. Either the amount of butter or agave syrup is much too high and/or the amount of flour is much too low. 3/4 cup agave syrup to 1 cup flour is never going to produce cookie dough, especially not with butter too.
I made the Peanut Butter & Jelly ice cream. It was my first attempt at making ice cream. It is sooooo unbelievably good! I just ate a ton and now I feel sick but it was good! :^
Someone just bought this for me! I am really keen on my own ice cream base that I currently use, so I will just use that in place of the one he uses for the recipes, but wow, there are sooo many awesome unique flavors in here. I want to see some reviews!
I've made lots of the variations from this book using my own base- such as the spicy chocolate twist, jalepeno, chocolate martini, sweet cucumber, and starfruit.
The jalepeno recipe suggests 3 jalepenos. Jalepenos, to me, are not very spicy at all. I ended up adding about tablespoon of cayenne. Were I to make it again, I'd use 6 jalepenos or omit them all together and just use 2 T of cayenne. :P
About the Choc Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, I contacted the author via the publishers and it was agreed that the recipe was wrong. I was sent a new recipe for the cookie dough and it wasn't a corrected version of the original but a completely different recipe.
I made the vanilla ice cream and added chunks of Speculaas cookies. I was content with the taste and texture.
I also use the ladyfingers recipe in this book for tiramisu. They come out perfect every time.
I made Rocky Road today and it is delicious! I used So Delicious Coconut Milk unsweetened with Coconut Milk Original Creamer. For the marshmallows I used Sweet and Sara which were a pain to try and cut up so instead I kept my fingers moist and tore them into pieces and put them into the ice cream machine.
what types of ingredients does it involve? I read some reviews for a different vegan ice cream cookbook - Vice Cream - and some people complained that it used a lot of unusual/expensive ingredients (like cashews and maple syrup). It looks pretty cool, though.
I got Vice Cream from the library. (Wow!) Anyway, I buy raw cashews in bulk and keep them in the freezer. At the beginning of the book there is a section for substituting other sweeters if maple syrup is too expensive. I also like the raw chapter. The Vegan Scoop sounds good as well. I'm just trying to limit the number of cookbooks I purchase.
I'm so glad I checked this thread! I was just about to make the chocolate chip cookie dough and thought that 3/4 cup of agave was A LOT. I think I will just use my go to ccc recipe and add that to the ice cream.
That being said, I've made some of the basic recipes several times. I'm not too happy with the chocolate but I think that is because I haven't found a good coco powder to use that didn't leave a powdery taste. I've made the mint chocolate chip twice and loved it! I use So Delicious coconut milk beverage (that now comes in half gallon cartons) and coconut creamer instead of soy milk and soy creamer. I like the flavor much more.
I'm off to make the cookie dough ice cream and the butter pecan. I'll check back with updates :)
I now have this book!! (thanks hespy!!)
Vanilla:
I'm not huge on vanilla ice cream by itself, and this was fine. I see it more as a vehicle for weird flavors and adding stuff, though.
Chocolate:
YEAH. Maybe it's the chocolate I'm using or something, but this oddly comes out tasting like mocha. I don't know where the coffee flavor is coming from. J agrees. Anyway, it's hands-down delicious. Love it.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough:
Do you ever buy ice cream with stuffs in it, and you're like, "HEY, there's not enough stuffs in this!"? This is not the case. There's practically too much cookie dough in it. Yeah, probably too much. The dough by itself is pretty good. I didn't use agave and instead subbed sugar (2/3 of water it called for). A good, decadent ice cream that is about half cookie dough.
Peanut Butter Banana:
Yummm. Very rich. I added some cinnamon. Delicious stuff.
S'mores:
The opposing picture to this is actually the vanilla graham ice cream sandwiched between crackers and chocolate, and this one is actually chocolate ice cream with marshmallows, chips, sprinkled with graham crumbs. It's pretty good. It seemed silly to toast the marshmallows, but you can sort of taste it. Also, I used Dandies for the marshmallows, and since they're not mini, I waited for them to cool down after toasting them and chopped them into fours. It worked fine (though sticky).
Chocolate Marshmallow:
Good ice cream. I decided on this over Rocky Road on account of not liking nuts in ice cream. The marshmallows don't get totally hard when frozen, but just really chewy.
Jasmine:
Whew, really strong jasmine flavor. I think I'd rather have maybe half the amount of flavoring called for. Maybe the stuff I was using was stronger than what this dude uses, but it came out almost bitter (like lavender). Still, I like jasmine, but I have to eat this in pretty small quantities.
Cardamom Rose:
STRONG CARDAMOM HERE. Man. It pretty much overshadows the rose. I love cardamom though, and it winds up being almost a gritty/crunchy ice cream because of all the spice here. You could cut the cardamom in half and still have plenty of flavor.
Black Sesame:
Instead of just crushing the seeds, I ground them in a spice grinder (most black sesame desserts I see have them completely blended). I wound up with some larger chunks of seeds though, which is kind of disruptive to the texture. I think that blending them is definitely the ticket. Nice nutty flavor; black sesame tastes different than regular sesame in some way that I can't really describe, but it really lends itself to desserts. I thickened this one with tapioca starch instead of arrowroot powder, which actually seemed to work better. Since I'm out of arrowroot, I think I'll just use tapioca now.
HOW HAVE YOU MADE THAT MANY ICE CREAMS IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS??
whoaaaa!
Well, I tried the vanilla ice cream before putting in the cookie dough, so that review is kind of a cheat. Then, I make half batches of the ice cream, and between us two fatties... yeah, it gets eaten.
But in my freezer right now there is still the cookie dough one, black sesame, jasmine, and peanut butter banana.
Fair enough.
I only make ice cream for other people, or when we're having lots of people over who will eat it.
My mate just helped me out last month by finishing off some chilli/lime ice cream that I had leftover from a dinner party in July last year
... I am intrigued by black sesame though...
I made:
Spicy chocolate (or whatever it's called)
Sweet ginger tea
Vanilla hazelnut
I made them using mimicreme (unsweetened) instead of creamer, and tapioca instead of arrowroot. The tapioca seemed to thicken the ginger one excessively (it was immediately like thick pudding!) so I cut the portion in half for the next ice cream, vanilla hazelnut. That one didn't thicken too much =/ Eh, I'm not sure how much it really matters.
I haven't tried the spicy chocolate in the final form yet, but it was mighty good pre-freezing! I used less cayenne, plus mine is old so probably even less spicy. I really like the cinnamon flavor from the abuelita chocolate discs in this ice cream. Before freezing, any of these ice creams are pretty much pudding. Which is awesome, because that means this is also a pudding cookbook.
I'm eating the ginger one right now and SO TASTY. Spicy delicious. It's like those ginger chews things, but in ice cream form. I don't think I even did quite the full amount of ginger. I also added a bit of ginger extract (idk why, considering the copious amount of ginger already, just feelin' fancy). Awesome idea for ice cream. it would also be good to cross this with a fruit type of ice cream, like... ginger pear, or ginger nectarine.
Vanilla hazelnut was pretty good pre-freezing too. The hazelnut flavor is way more dominant than the vanilla, and I didn't add actual hazelnuts. I'm guessing this would go well with the caramel in this book.
I made the madeleines recipe towards the end, and it totally didn't turn out. Looking at the recipe, I wasn't sure of it to begin with - mostly almond flour, Tbsps of lemon zest - but I went by the book anyway. I differed in that I wasn't using a madeleine pan, and instead used silicone cupcake liners. Also, I used flax as the egg replacer (I don't have ener-g). Those two changes may have been part of the downfall of this attempt. Anyway, the fat completely separated from the rest while baking, yielding a very greasy (turned a couple paper towels clear...), chewy and very lemony cookie thing. The amount of zest seems excessive for the amount of dry ingredients, and I wonder if there's a mistake in the amount of flour? Idk. It's also weird to have almond meal in madeleines. ALSO, there's no leavener... hmm. I made the madeleine recipe from Vegan Boulangerie along side this, and surprisingly (unlike most stuff I've made from there so far), that one turned out way better and madeleine-like. Weird.
Please post the chocolate martini recipe. thanks.
I may have been making a lot of these...
Caramel
I didn't do caramel + vanilla as here, but I made the caramel sauce stuff and used it in the Irish Cream ice cream. I'm not too experienced at making candy, and I had to sub the coconut milk with soy creamer, but it turned out great. The flavor was perfect and the texture was good for both mixing (thickish liquid) and frozen (very thick sauce).
Butterscotch
So good. I was afraid that I burnt the butterscotch mixture a bit, but I hadn't. It mixed very easily into the soymilk/creamer stuff, and had a great flavor. I added chocolate chips to the ice cream, which made it a bit like cookie dough in ice cream form.
Nectarine
As it turns out my nectarines were not so great (not sour, but flavorless!), so I tried to salvage this by blending in strawberry jam and strawberry extract. So I wound up with 80% strawberry ice cream flavor and 20% nectarine, heh. This didn't freeze as well, I don't know why, but the ice crystals were noticeably larger. Maybe I froze it too soon, or maybe it has something to do with the fruit?
Peanut Butter Flax
This starts off as a *very* thick mixture, on account of the peanut butter and flax. It's also not too sweet. The amount of sugar in these recipes is a bit of a mystery to me, as this one has less sugar (despite having a substantial amount of two non-sweet things, peanut and flax), versus fruit or adzuki ice creams which have the higher amount of sugar even though they're already sweet... =/ Well, I added chocolate chips, which helped a bit. The texture with the flax was kind of weird though.
Orange Dragonfruit
I think dragonfruit is ok, but this ice cream seemed to cool to pass up, and I can get dragonfruit, so I tried it. But, I didn't have orange juice... so I subbed mango lemonade (hey, it's what I had) and some orange extract. Yep. It turned out really good! I thought that it needed a bit more tartness, so I ended up adding a little lemon juice. Mildly fruity, and the seeds aren't really disruptive even though frozen.
Adzuki Bean
This was way sweet. The adzuki paste I see is always sweetened, and maybe the one I got is sweeter than average? I have no idea. But I'd definitely add sugar to taste, as this might have actually been fine without sugar, or maybe a couple tablespoons. Anyway, the adzuki didn't really have a strong flavor by itself, so I added some strawberry extract, which went well.
Green Tea
MATCHA. It was good, though it was hard to get the matcha to mix (some did, some remained clumped). Good amount of tea.
Vanilla Graham
I figured it would be pretty good, but it was even better. I'm not sure if you really have to freeze the crumbs first (but I did). I'm not sure how to describe the flavor, but it was better than the graham crackers themselves... I guess mixing it with the vanilla ice cream really does something.
Earl Grey
I'm much more of a green tea fan than black tea, but this was really good still, and the bergamot scent was actually still there after freezing and everything. I don't think it needs to be steeped as long as the instructions say (something like 20 minutes??), instead I steeped it for about 7 minutes, and there was plenty of flavor. I didn't want to get any of the bitter tannins.
Irish Cream
I added the whiskey after the ice cream seemed pretty much done freezing, not sure if anything much would happen, but a minute later, the ice cream was soup! I let the machine go for longer, but it never froze the same. It also thawed pretty quickly, if it needed any time at all... I added caramel to this ice cream, and it was probably the worst one to add it to, since the lack of frozen-ness for the ice cream meant the pretty much hardened caramel sank to the bottom eventually =/ However, the flavors went well... I'd cut the whiskey in half to get it to freeze a little better.
Mint Lime
Ugh. I was excited for this, certain the flavors would go well. Maybe they do, but both flavors were way too strong. The mint was to the point that it was bitter, and the lime was too much. I'd cut both flavors in half, but not sure I want to try this again anyway...
Sweet Basil
Surprisingly good. I went into this expecting weird, but it wasn't that weird. I think I added more basil than called for (maybe), but the flavor wasn't extremely strong, though the flavor is detectable and actually goes well in ice cream & with vanilla, IMO. I'm not sure if I'd try the variations mentioned (cinnamon, lemon, lime), 'cause I wouldn't want to mess with a good thing! It also ended up greener than the picture (though perhaps that picture is of the cinnamon variation), a little greener than green tea ice cream.