I’ve been struggling to make a decent keto ice cream using Carrie Brown’s book, and I think I finally hit something that has the right consistency and was quite delicious with considerable adaptation from her recipes as a starting point. For whatever reason, I could never get the guar gum to work quite right, and the ice creams tended to come out either too icy or too gummy. I found that adapting the base with egg yolks seemed to do the trick for consistency. The other substitution I made is using allulose–we don’t keep xylitol in the house because of the dog, but I did find that using straight allulose has a somewhat flat sweetness and needs to be adjusted with something like stevia glycerite. The resulting ice cream was quite scoopable from the freezer (something that xylitol based recipes can also do)
At this point, the base recipe I developed deviates quite a bit from Carrie’s recipes, but I found her book to be a good starting point with this allulose and egg custard based adaptations.
From my experimentation, my first real success was adapting Carrie’s “Butter Me Up Pecan Ice Cream”:
- 4 oz. macadamia nut milk (I would’ve probably just used more heavy cream, but I had some, so I used it)
- 12 oz. heavy whipping cream
- 1 can (14.5 oz) coconut milk
- 3.5 oz. allulose
- 1 tsp. kosher salt
- 4 egg yolks
- 2 oz. unsalted butter
- 1.75 tsp. stevia glycerite (I would start with 1 tsp. and add 1/4 tsp. at a time more to taste)
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
In a small pan or pot, cook the butter on medium low until nice and brown and nutty smelling–be careful not to burn it. Set aside.
In a large mixing bowl (to be used in a double boiler), whisk the egg yolks, the milk, cream, coconut milk, allulose, and salt until well combined. Place on a double boiler and heat until around 170F whisking regularly. Take off heat, add browned butter, stevia to taste (note that the finished ice cream will be less sweet due to the cold than the liquid custard), and the vanilla extract. Let cool and place into refrigerator overnight or until well chilled.
- 5.25 oz raw pecan halves
- 1 oz. butter
- salt to taste
Melt the butter and toss in pecans, sprinkle salt and roast in a 250F oven for about an hour until they are fragrant. I happened to also sprinkle some allulose and some erithrytol to candy the pecans a bit, but that is quite optional. Let cool, chop to small pieces and store in the freezer.
Churn custard in ice cream maker (as per your ice cream maker’s instructions) until soft serve consistency. Add in the chopped pecans at the end and after they’re incorporated, quickly transfer into a pre-chilled container, let set in the freezer for at least eight hours.
This seems to make a good ice cream base (if you take out the browned butter above) and I will probably experiment with manipulating the underlying egg yolks, Serious Eats had a great post about the effect of egg yolks in ice cream. Another thing I might experiment with is the sweetener I combine with allulose and possibly the amount of allulose.
Gratuitous ice cream shot:
