Stem ginger & coconut vegan ice-cream – parve

Creamy, dreamy stem-ginger ice-cream makes a decadent dessert – and it’s completely vegan! This four-ingredient, grown-up treat is wonderful served in chocolate dipped cones.

A few years ago, DH bought me an ice-cream maker for my birthday – woohoo! We enjoyed some amazing home-made treats like this fresh peach ice-cream and this wonderful banana blueberry ripple flavour.

But since then, I’ve discovered that dairy really doesn’t agree with me. While the occasional lick of someone else’s cone might be OK, a whole bowlful of milky, creamy deliciousness will leave me feeling rubbish. So the machine has been languishing in the bottom of the cupboard, and my family have been complaining that I never make ice-cream anymore.

Making dairy free ice-cream

I felt certain it must be possible to recreate all the creamy, dreamy lusciousness of a really great ice-cream, without any of the dairy products. I just had to figure it out. And fortunately, I had the internet to help me.

Several wasted productive hours of browsing later, I had a plan.

A loverly bunch of coconuts…

Firstly, coconut milk was going to be key. Unlike most other plant-based milks it’s typically quite high in fat, which is essential to creating a creamy, unctuous texture in the finished ice-cream.

Secondly, the coconut milk needed to be cooked into a custard prior to freezing. This is something that I’ve done before with dairy ice-cream mixtures and it really does improve the final product, I think by ensuring that the sugar is all dissolved, among other things. Making a custard also provides an opportunity to add flavourings that wouldn’t necessarily blend well in a cold/ambient mixture, such as the ground ginger I used here.

Strong flavours

And finally, I had to use a STRONG flavour to disguise the coconut! DH is not a lover of coconut and if this vegan ice-cream were to be coconut flavour with just a hint of whatever, I’d never hear the end of the complaints. Hence, stem ginger ice-cream, which is sufficiently fiery to largely overwhelm the naturally coconutty taste. It’s also one of my favourite flavours!

(For what it’s worth, I actually quite like coconut, and may well make a batch of ‘coconut’ flavour coconut ice-cream, for my own personal enjoyment, and definitely not for sharing.)

Ingredients in vegan stem ginger ice-cream

This deliciously creamy vegan ice-cream recipes uses the following simple ingredients:

• Stem ginger in syrup – sometimes called ‘preserved ginger’
• Canned coconut milk – full fat, not ‘light’ coconut milk
• Ground ginger – optional but helps to give it a fiery ginger flavour
• Cornflour – also called cornstarch

Worth the effort

This vegan stem ginger ice-cream does take a bit more effort than simply mix and churn, but it’s well worth it. The ingredients are combined and made into a thick custard, which is chilled before churning. This gives a wonderfully creamy and smooth texture to the finished ice-cream.

Once cooked, I chilled the custard in the fridge overnight so it was ready to freeze the next day.

How to serve vegan stem ginger ice-cream

We ate our stem ginger ice-cream as dessert after our Shabbat dinner, with some almond and sesame biscuits and a fruit salad. YUM! It turned a simple scoop into a special dessert.

This ginger ice-cream would also be terrific with some shaved dark chocolate, or a chocolate fudge sauce. It’s definitely great in a chocolate dipped cone, as you can see in the photo. 

Recipe makes about 600ml of delicious vegan ice-cream – roughly equivalent to one tub of ‘premium’ ice-cream.

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📖 Recipe

A note on ice-cream machines

If you’re thinking of buying an ice-cream machine, I can definitely recommend the Magimix Gelato Chef which is the one I have. It has a built-in freezer unit, which means that you don’t have to remember to freeze the bowl overnight when you want to use it, and you can do batch after batch with no problem. The downside though, is that it’s quite a bit more expensive than the ‘freeze the bowl overnight’ style machines, which are significantly more affordable. Whichever one you go for, I hope you enjoy this delicious, creamy, vegan ice-cream recipe!

More delicious ice-cream recipes

If you’re looking for more ice-cream recipes to put your new machine through its paces, how about:

Dairy free ice-cream recipes 

Bountilicious chocolate & coconut dairy free ice-cream, from Kavey Eats
Dairy free chocolate peanut butter ice-cream, from Joy Food Sunshine
Easy blackberry & apple sorbet (with a hint of thyme), from Fuss Free Flavours
Kauai Pie ice-cream: coffee ice-cream with coconut, macadamia nuts and chocolate chunks, from Organic Dietician
Lime and coconut ice-cream (parve), from Family Friends Food
Paleo vanilla ice-cream, from Joy Food Sunshine
Vegan Turkish Delight ice-cream, from Wallflower Kitchen

Creamy ice-cream recipes

Banana Blueberry Ripple ice-cream, from Family Friends Food
Chocolate lime ice-cream, from Farmersgirl Kitchen
Fresh peach ice-cream, from Family Friends Food
Kefir ice-cream, from Champagne Tastes
Salted caramel crunchie ice-cream, from Fab Food 4 All
Strawberry & vanilla ice-milk, from Fab Food 4 All
White chocolate Eton Mess ice-cream, from Farmersgirl Kitchen