Why all
the screaming?

I don’t know about you, but I’m hoarse from all this ice cream! (You know why, right? I refuse to repeat the chant, but I couldn’t resist referring to it anyway.)

This summer, high season for ice cream, you may have made the mistake of thinking that there’s no such thing as a good plant-based ice cream. So let me set you straight.

To be honest, I wasn’t all too sure of that fact myself until I was developing recipes for “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking.” I had tried my share of icy coconut-milk-based concoctions: tasty, but honestly more like sorbet than ice cream, usually. The store-bought ones were full of all kinds of stabilizers and gums. Some shops were doing a good job with the vegan-ice-cream challenge — I particularly like Jeni’s Texas Sheet Cake flavor — but nothing truly blew me away until one day in 2022. That’s the day I walked into Yellow, Michael Rafidi’s then-pop-up cafe attached to his flagship restaurant, Albi, in D.C.’s Navy Yard neighborhood.

Albi, the chef’s ode to the food of his Palestinian heritage, was already my favorite restaurant in town, and I couldn’t wait to taste what he was cooking up at Yellow. Honestly, I don’t remember anything about what we got other than the tahini-oat soft serve, which was so beautifully rich and creamy it stopped me in my tracks. The chef was rushing back and forth behind the counter — this was years before he spun Yellow off into two standalone line-out-the-door cafes — and he quipped, “You know, it’s vegan.”

WHAT?

I emailed as soon as I got home, he sent me the recipe, and I started playing around. I had a few epiphanies in the process: First, his recipe worked so well with store-bought oat milk, but would homemade perhaps be even better? (Homemade oat milk can be a little, well, slimy, depending on your technique, and I had a feeling that would be a good thing when frozen. I was right. It was so effective I was able to lose the cornstarch chef Michael also used in his formula.)

Second, if tahini worked so well at providing such richness, could other nut and seed butters do the same? Indeed.

And third, if the formula was simply plant-based milk + nut butter + sugar + vanilla = ice cream, what if the plant-based milk was made from the same nut as the butter? Might that result in a concentrated flavor for something as delectable as, say, pistachio or hazelnut?

Why, yes, it could, and yes it did. The first time I tried it, with hazelnuts, I went from feeling discouraged about the possibilities of a great plant-based ice cream recipe for my book to feeling like I had, with a huge head start from one of D.C.’s most talented chefs, one of the book’s stars.

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I hope you try it. The process starts with 3 ½ cups of unsalted, unroasted nuts or seeds, and goes like this:

• Make nut milk with about a third of them.

• Toast the remaining two-thirds. Take most of them and turn them into nut butter in the food processor. Reserve the rest.

• Heat the nut milk, stir in sugar and the nut butter, and whisk until smooth.

• Cool the base, add vanilla, then churn it in an ice cream maker. Add most of the chopped nuts, transfer to a loaf pan, sprinkle more nuts on top, cover and freeze.

This is one of three ice cream recipes in “Mastering.” There’s the tahini ice cream that started everything — with my suggestions for add-ins such as black sesame seeds, swirls of pomegranate molasses and more. The third recipe is for an ice cream you can make with any fruit, and the trick to this one — which is based on cashews and vegan cream cheese, an interpretation of Jeni Britton Bauer’s stellar ice cream base from her cookbook — is to double down on the fruit flavor by including freeze-dried fruit in addition to fresh. That’s a brilliant technique I picked up from my brilliant friend Becky Krystal, recipes editor at the Washington Post.

No matter what kind of ice cream you make, it’ll be better if you follow some of my favorite tips:

• Think ahead. Freeze your ice cream machine insert a day or preferably two or more in advance. (I store mine there so I don’t have to plan quite as much.) Freeze the container — preferably a metal loaf pan — at least a few hours ahead of time, too.

• Get everything really cold before you start churning. This could mean using an ice bath to cool the base if you want ice cream sooner, or refrigerating it overnight if you don’t mind a little extra waiting.

• If you have just one add-in, such as the nuts in this recipe, you can sprinkle it into the ice cream as it’s finishing churning, or if you forget (guilty), you can layer it in when you transfer the churned mixture to the loaf pan for freezing. For multiple add-ins, use the layering technique.

• Press parchment paper directly onto the surface of the ice cream before covering with a lid (or foil) and freezing, to avoid ice crystals or freezer burn.

  

  Pistachio Ice Cream.

• Plant-based ice cream tends to freeze harder than its dairy equivalent, so make sure to give it 10 to 15 minutes or so at room temperature before you scoop.

• If you don’t have an ice cream maker, all is not lost. Just freeze the base, without the chopped nuts, in ice cube trays, let them soften at room temp for 5 or 10 minutes, then blitz them in the food processor until creamy. Now mix in the chopped nuts and freeze in the loaf pan.

I break for animals:
Trevor the Iggy

Recipe: Dreamy Nut or Seed Butter Ice Cream

This is how you can turn five ingredients (including water and salt!) into luscious pistachio, hazelnut, peanut butter, pecan, or walnut ice cream—or even ice cream made from pumpkin or sunflower seeds.

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Makes 1 quart

Time: Weekend

Storage: Freeze in an airtight container for up to 3 months.

• 3½ cups (830ml; see Notes) raw pistachios, skin-on hazelnuts (see Notes), peanuts, pecans, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, or sunflower seeds

• 3 cups (700ml) filtered water

• 1¼ cups (250g) organic cane sugar

• ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt

• 1½ teaspoons vanilla paste or extract

Cover 1 cup (240ml) of the nuts or seeds with enough water to cover by 2 inches (5cm), cover, and soak overnight. Rinse and drain.

Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

In a high-powered blender, combine the drained nuts or seeds and the 3 cups (700ml) water. Blend until smooth, at least 1 minute. Pour the mixture into a nut-milk bag set over a bowl, close the bag, and squeeze and twist to extract as much of the liquid as possible. Save the pulp for smoothies or to add to muffin or pancake batter.

On a large sheet pan, spread out the remaining 2½ cups (600ml) nuts or seeds. Toast until deeply browned and very fragrant, 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the variety of nuts or seeds. Remove and immediately transfer ¾ cup (180ml) of the nuts or seeds to a bowl and set aside.

Transfer the remaining 1¾ cups (420ml) nuts or seeds to a food processor and process until the nuts or seeds form a ball, anywhere from 2 to 6 minutes. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides and break up the ball and continue processing until the mixture turns smooth and liquid, 1 to 4 minutes. Measure out ¾ cup (180ml) of the nut/seed butter and save any extra for spreading on toast or eating however you’d like.

Set a bowl over an ice bath consisting of half water and half ice.

In a saucepan, bring the nut or seed milk to a simmer over medium heat. Whisk in the nut/seed butter, sugar, and salt. Whisk for a minute or two until the sugar and salt are fully dissolved.

Pour the mixture into the bowl set over the ice bath and stir, scraping the bottom and sides of the bowl often, until it feels cool to the touch. You might need to refresh the ice in the ice bath a time or two. Stir in the vanilla. (Alternatively, transfer the mixture to the refrigerator, cover, and chill overnight.)

Process the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions until it is as thick as soft serve.

While the ice cream is churning, very coarsely chop the reserved ¾ cup (180ml) toasted nuts, leaving them in big pieces. (If you’re using seeds, don’t chop them.)

When the ice cream is thick, pour in all but a handful of the chopped nuts or whole seeds and let the ice cream finish churning. Immediately transfer it to the frozen loaf pan or other container, and sprinkle with the remaining chopped nuts. Press parchment paper directly onto the surface, cover with foil or the container lid, and freeze until solid, at least 8 hours or more.

Notes

• The gram weight of 1 cup will vary by the nut or seed, so it’s easier to use the volume measure of 830 milliliters. The per-cup weight of the nuts will range from 100 grams (pecans, walnuts) to 150 grams (peanuts), with everything else in between.

• Many recipes call for you to peel hazelnuts before or after roasting, but I like the touch of bitterness the skins impart here, especially since that flavor is tempered by the cold.

Recipe from “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2024). Copyright Joe Yonan.

More favorite ice cream recipes

These are gift links to recipe at the Post. Note that they require you to register but not subscribe. Gift links are free to access for 2 weeks, so if you want these recipes but don’t subscribe or want to subscribe, I suggest you save them!

Vegan Chai Ice Cream

Vegan Coconut Ice Cream Base

Chocolate Shell for Ice Cream