If you’re looking for healthy, vegan homemade ice cream bursting with tropical flavours, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’ll make coconut jackfruit ice cream from scratch without using sugar, cream, and not even an ice cream machine. Sounds exciting? Let’s do it!
Coconut milk ice cream is one of Southeast Asia’s most popular ice cream flavours, while ripe yellow jackfruit is a hyper-flavourful tropical fruit often used in Asian sweets and desserts.
In this recipe, we decided to bring the two together into one wonderfully exotic ice cream!
And the brilliant thing about using coconut milk and jackfruit for ice cream is that you basically won’t need any other ingredient.
Why?
Traditional ice cream relies on high-fat heavy cream and whole milk for creaminess, plus lots of sugar for sweetness.
But because coconut milk is naturally creamy and jackfruit already tastes very sweet, you don’t have to use neither whipped cream nor refined sugar to make the ice cream silky and tasty.
This means you’ll also have super healthy homemade ice cream that’s dairy-free, sugar-free, and vegan. And incredibly good too!
So how do you use jackfruit in ice cream?
While you can simply blend and add most fruits to your ice cream base, jackfruit is a little different.
First of all, make sure you buy ripe yellow jackfruit, not the young green fruit used for vegan mock meats.
Ripe jackfruit pods look bright yellow; they’re sweet and flavourful. Jackfruit tastes like an amazing cross between mangos, bananas, and pineapples. It’s really unique!
You can find yellow jackfruit fresh, frozen, or canned at your local Asian food market, big supermarkets or online.
Because jackfruit flesh is very dense and fibrous, it doesn’t blend smoothly. So, it requires a little extra prep before you can use it for ice cream.
What you have to do is simmer the chopped fruit in a little water before blending it until smooth. It’s pretty much like making a jam!
In fact, we used our homemade jackfruit jam as a base and added this jackfruit puree to tinned coconut milk to make the ice cream mixture. Easy!
Once the ice cream base is ready, you can either pop it into your ice cream maker or follow our simple trick to churn the jackfruit ice cream by hand.
It’s super easy to do! It will just take longer than with a machine, so make sure you do this recipe when you know you’ll be home all day, like on the weekend.
But your patience will be rewarded! This ice cream is utterly delicious. You’ll love the rich and nutty taste of coconut combined with the intense tropical flavour of jackfruit.
And now that you know how to make ice cream without a machine, the sky is the limit! You can try our salted caramel coconut ice cream or lavender blueberry ice cream recipes next!
And with any leftover jackfruit puree, make a spongy jackfruit loaf cake or simply have it with oatmeal or toasted bread. Yum!
