Dairy Free Chocolate Ice Cream made with Rice Milk

Playing with new ingredients as well as a new lens!

A friend has someone visiting who is on a dairy, wheat, soy and egg free diet so it was a bit of a challenge to make a sweet treat for her. She knew I had been making ice cream lately from yoghurt and asked if it would be possible to make ice cream from rice milk. I said I would test run a recipe and then pass it along if it was successful. Of course I passed on the first batch of rice milk ice cream too! Since I couldn’t make a custard base with eggs I opted for a Gelato style ice cream, thickened with corn flour. The rice milk, which I had never tasted before, was quite sweet so there is very little sugar added to the recipe and the richness of the 70% chocolate over shadows the rice milk flavour.

It was a great success by everyone, not just the young lady on the special diet.

I have also been playing practising with my new macro lens and trying out new techniques, some are working well but other things I took for granted with a wider lens are proving frustrating but I suppose it is just a case of practise make perfect.

Ingredients

• 500ml rice milk
• 50g sugar
• 100g 70% cocoa chocolate, chopped
• 3 tsp corn flour/ corn starch

Method

1. Mix 50ml of rice milk and corn flour together till smooth.
2. Heat the rest of rice milk in a pan.
3. Just before the milk boils remove from the heat and stir in the corn flour.
4. Once thoroughly mixed return pan to the heat and cook on a low heat, stirring constantly for a few minutes until milk thickens. It is important to cook out the flavour of the corn flour otherwise the gelato will taste floury.
5. Remove from the heat and add the sugar.
6. Pour into a bowl and add the chocolate and stir continuously until the chocolate has melted.
7. Chill in fridge overnight or until completely cold.
8. Transfer the mix into the ice cream maker and process according to manufacturers instructions.
9. Keeps well for a week (if you can keep it that long!) but after that I find it forms too many ice crystals in a domestic freezer.