Ahh, the delights of Ice Cream! Truly it is a most delicious treat. How many family memories include a dessert of a bowl of ice cream, perhaps with a side of cookies? How many children first learn the value of money when the ice cream man rolls through your 
neighborhood playing his merry tune? You learn that to obtain that delicious frozen treat you have to have money to give the nice man, so he will give you your choice of frozen heaven. It makes doing your chores worthwhile since you get an allowance in exchange for which you can purchase ice cream, unless you live in the middle of nowhere outside of town like I did, in which case you spend your chore money on comic books.
Once I grew up and became more worldly, I discovered that there were flavors of ice cream other than vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Okay, I am
exaggerating, I grew up also loving butter brickle ice cream. This love transformed into a love of Baskin Robbin’s Pralines and Cream. This was not a good thing, as the ingredients of this ice cream are rather scary. Be that as it may, ice cream has become unbelievably rich and diverse in its flavor spectrum. Any brief trip down the refrigerated aisle at the grocery store will display a bewildering array of flavors of ice cream and ice cream-like products.
Many years ago my love of ice cream took a severe blow. I discovered that I had a leaky gut and was gluten sensitive. The protein in milk casein looks almost identical to gluten to the body and cross-reaction is the almost inevitable result. That meant no more dairy for me. To add fuel to this sad fire, my
brain function was compromised by the autoimmune reactions that the leaky gut was creating. That meant that I had to get off carbs altogether. In plain English, that meant no sugar. How do you have ice cream without the cream or the milk, and without the sugar? Those are the main ingredients of ice cream. A bonus stab was the discovery that the primary emulsifier and stabilizing agent used in most commercial ice cream – polysorbate 80, and its cohort carboxymethylcellulose cause inflammatory bowel disease – the very issue I had to avoid.
This was 20 years ago, and back then alternatives to ice cream were pretty scarce. There were a couple of soy milk fake ice creams and a couple of rice milk ice creams, but all of them were full of sugar – more than regular ice cream had! Finally, I found a brand of coconut milk ice cream that was sweetened with the
same ingredients, erythritol, and stevia, that I developed myself as an alternative sweetener for sale in my office back before it was commercially available. This gave us an ice cream-like substitute which we used for years. It was okay, but it was always hard as a rock when it came out of the freezer. It had to sit out for a while before we could get a spoon into it to serve some up.
Over the years I have tried many times to develop my own ice cream recipe. I bought an electric ice cream maker and played with many interesting concoctions, but none of them ever stayed soft enough to serve from the freezer like real ice cream. I had pretty much given up on ever having a real ice cream-like dessert, but without the cream, the milk, or the sugar (not to mention the ever-present polysorbate 80).
Last year, sometime after Thanksgiving but before Christmas, I came across a recipe for a simple home-made marshmallow that was sugar-free. I have also played with creating this elusive creature many times. I was successful in the past, but the process was extremely difficult and tedious. This recipe I 
found was still tedious, but simple! The key to making this recipe lay in using a new rare sugar called allulose. I had been trying to use erythritol, which likes to recrystallize once you make something with it. With the allulose, all you had to do was make a hot syrup of the allulose and add it gradually to gelatin that had been moistened, and then whip the heck out of it for ten to fifteen minutes (the tedious part). As the allulose syrup cooled, it formed a stiff marshmallow cream that was easily formed into quite delicious marshmallows.
Ellen really loved the marshmallows, like really loved them! She knew I was not going to stand around for 15 minutes on any regular basis making these precious treats, so for Christmas she bought me a KitchenAid stand mixer. All I had to do was add the 
gelatin and water and heat up the allulose, pour it in, and turn the mixer on. It would do the mixing for 15 minutes without any help from me. Anyway, after about the 8th or 9th batch of marshmallows, I started thinking if there was some way I could adapt the marshmallow recipe to make ice cream. My first try was to add a can of coconut milk to a marshmallow batch, and it made a whole new kind of marshmallow… a good kind. Then I started thinking about the food chemistry of ice cream. Ice cream starts out as uncooked egg custard. The cream simply adds a source of fat that is able to form really tiny droplets, which the phosphatidylcholine in the egg yolk emulsifies. The milk supplies protein that does something, but I did not know what. The sugar probably binds to the protein, making it more soluble and possibly helping it form a colloid. That was about as far as my chemistry would take me. So, could I replicate these effects without using actual cream, milk, and sugar?
To make an already long story shorter, the answer was yes. The first batch of my new sugar-free, dairy-free ice cream was light, fluffy, and easily spooned from the container fresh out of the freezer. It not only tasted like real ice cream, but it also had the same mouth-feel. It contained coconut milk, xylose, gelatin, eggs, whey, collagen, oligosaccharides, salt, and 
vanilla. I played with the ingredients a bit with the second batch and came out with a version that was much richer and denser, more like gelato. Ellen liked this version the best. Since then I have made about a dozen different batches, each time changing the ingredients, trying to find the perfect combination of ingredient simplicity, ease of preparation, and ice cream taste and texture. The original recipe involved several steps and ingredients not found in the average kitchen. I also wanted to make a version that is shelf-stable, meaning that you don’t need any perishable ingredients. I think I have closed in on this combination and will be able to make a version that can be put in a bag like a cake mix to which all you need to add is coconut milk and a bit of water.
I have experimented with adding flavors to the ice cream base. I made up a raspberry ice cream, a blueberry version, a chocolate version, one with tiny sugar-free chocolate chips, and even a version with a sugar-free caramel sauce I cooked up mixed into the ice cream after it had begun to set in the freezer. I 
have had these flavors taste tested by Ellen’s clients as well as our Spiritual Support Circle group. So far the reviews have been positive, so this journey has not been entirely one of self-delusion. Sometimes my attempts to reproduce food items that feel like regular food, but without carbs, sugars, grains, dairy, or seed oils require a stretch of the imagination to augment the final product. This time the final product is actually quite good, without compromise.
A final thought, the quality of coconut milk makes a big difference. Some brands are really good and rich while others are really thin and poor tasting. Ice 
cream needs good high-fat-rich coconut milk. I am talking canned coconut milk here, and a good brand at that. This does not work with coconut water or coconut milk that is designed to replace typical cow’s milk. The brand I use has 750 calories per can of coconut milk fat. It pours out thicker than real cream.
For those of you that have any dairy issues or leaky gut/autoimmune issues, this is a really healthy food. It should actually help heal your gut. It is just a bonus that it tastes like ice cream and feels like ice cream.
Take care,
David