Strawberry coconut basil ice kream!

Making ice cream chez moi

This Christmas my wonderful grandmother gave me a Cuisinart ice cream maker! Wahoo! Isn't she a stylish beauty? (The ice cream maker, see picture on the right. My grandma is a stylish beauty too, but I don't have a photo to share with you). I couldn't wait to experiment and make a rawkin' ice cream, despite the weather in Connecticut being below zero.

At the same time, my sister was in from Manhattan and kindly scoured the city to bring me two young coconuts. Did you know there is a shortage of young coconuts in NYC? Well, there was in mid-December. I was equally excited to experiment with coconut, as it is not an ingredient I commonly have on hand in Paris.

First step was figuring out how to open the coconut. In my excitement I started hacking at the first one, and finally found the soft spot on the bottom of the nut. While this enabled me to drain the water, it did not help me open the shell to get the meat out. My dad came to the rescue, wrapping the nut in a bag and smacking it with a sledgehammer. Ah, yes, preparing raw food can be entertainment for the whole family! To open the second coconut, I took a more judicious approach and pulled up The Raw Chef YouTube channel for some video schooling. Here is a super resource for how to open a young coconut, thanks to Russell James.

And to complement the video, here is a step-by-step photo stream of a successful, and less eventful, coconut opening:

Finding the soft spot after shaving the top of the husk, and pouring out the water.

Cracking open the top of the coconut to be able to scoop out the meat.

Fresh young coconut meat cleaned and ready for tasting!

First Mix of Raw Ice Kream
Why is it spelled kream and not cream? It's a raw vegan thing, a way to differentiate from animal products (like saying nut cheeze and mylks).

Again, in my excitement to see how the ice cream maker worked, I did not follow a recipe, and instead threw a bunch of ingredients into the mixer: coconut meat + water, handful of cashews, big handfuls of strawberries, 1/2 T of coconut oil, raw agave and vanilla. I was concerned that I did not have enough mylk for a creamy consistency, or enough liquid, but I thought, well, let's just give it a mix and see what happens. Once I had poured the mixture into the ice cream maker, I added in the chopped basil.

You can see the blended concoction in the picture below, and the following pictures of the mix being turned into ice cream; the machine took 25 minutes from liquid to frozen block.

Liquid concoction in the blender

Ice cream maker starting to mix the liquid

After mixing for 15 minutes

Completed ice cream spread in a glass pan

Two scoops!

 

The end result was a delicious ice kream, which was easy to make. It tasted great, though I will work on improving the creaminess of the texture the next time. Perhaps I will follow a recipe.  :)

• If you have a yummy raw ice kream recipe, please share! You can share it in the comments section.
  
• Do you have a tip on how to increase the creaminess of raw frozen desserts?