Kefir ice cream

This is a decadent and rich vanilla ice cream with a gentle background sour note produced from the milk kefir fermentation. It sounds sort of healthy, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll come clean from the off – it isn’t. There, I said. For ice-cream to be really good, and I mean properly good, to have that luscious velvety mouthfeel and luxuriously creamy taste, it needs to contain a high proportion of fat and sugar. I’ve been making my own ice-cream, sorbet and frozen yogurt at home for years and nothing can beat a freshly churned full fat, all singing, all dancing ice-cream.

Good gut bacteria

The ‘healthy’ element here is the introduction of kefir, which gives our gut a dose of healthy gut bacteria.  Our microbiome plays a vital role in the maintenance of our health and contributes to our immune system, digestion, metabolism, mood, sleep, enzyme production, libido, energy levels… So anything to encourage those bacteria to flourish and improve our microbiome can never be a bad thing. AND if we can have an occasional treat at the same time, even better!

So let’s get back to the recipe. The idea came about as my kefir grains had gone crazy and I found myself with a glut of kefir milk. I’d already made kefir sourdough, smoothies, dressings, banana bread and overnight oats, so what else could I make? It was a particularly hot day and I thought, why not ferment the ice-cream mixture with the milk guzzling grains? I’ve made frozen yogurt before, so why not kefir?

Easy to make method

When making most ice-cream recipes, I would use an egg-based custard method. The eggs emulsify with the fats in the cream to deliver the richest and most velvety result. But in this instance, a Philadelphia style made practical sense. Why? Because heating the custard mixture would destroy the probiotic benefits of the kefir. The Philly style is also super easy to make as there’s no potentially risky egg splitting to contend with. It’s just a matter of: mix, ferment, taste and churn.

Vanilla Ice (sorry, terrible pun!)

The kefir grains fed on the natural sugars in the milk, which over time produced the most pleasing tang. I chose vanilla as the key flavouring as I love it and I didn’t want to mask the gentle tang of the kefir too much anyway. Vanilla is definitely not beige in my opinion and using a good quality one makes all the difference. I highly recommend www.littlepod.co.uk and it’s really good value for money and lasts for ages.

It’s all about the tang

I gave the kefir grains a meal to remember and dropped 1 tsp worth into a large bowl of double cream, milk kefir, vanilla and sugar for about seven hours and left on the worksurface covered. It was a fairly warm day, so it began to ferment fairly quickly. The beauty of this method is I could keep tasting it and remove the grains when I was happy with the flavour. I then rescued the grains by straining the mixture – which had thickened considerably – through a sieve and put them into a new milky home.

It’s necessary to chill the mixture before churning, so it continued to ferment a little in the fridge overnight. Depending on your tastes, you could take the length of fermentation a lot further. Remember, when tasting any base mixture for ice-cream, the sweetness and tanginess is not quite so pronounced once frozen.

The result

This ice cream is unadulterated pleasure – creamy and slightly tangy all in one, indulgent and oh so moreish. It got the big thumbs up from my taste testers.

If you don’t have kefir grains then you could try using shop bought kefir. The fresher the better. Increasing the kefir to cream ratio to 500ml kefir/250ml double cream and the sugar to 170g to compensate for less fat. It will be sweeter than my fermented version but with the extra quantity of kefir, you will be able to taste the tang and also hopefully avoid the dreaded ice crystals from forming. Please note, I haven’t tested this version and I’d be interested to hear from anyone who tried it.