No Sugar added Nice Cream

Are you familiar with ‘nice’ ice cream? It’s a healthy and delicious fruit based ice cream primarily made from frozen bananas. With their high starch content and slightly sweet taste, bananas are a flavorful substitution for fat, flour, and sugar in smoothies, cakes, and even ice creams. Nice cream has actually been around for a while but my first experience happened last summer when my daughter decided to go completely sugar-free for a month. To satisfy her sweet cravings she loaded up on fruits for snacks and made ‘nice’ ice creams with different flavors.

Semi soft nice cream

With July being National Ice Cream month and the upcoming July 21 being the national ice cream day I thought to share the basic nice cream recipe with you. Nice ice-cream can be made with any fruit and nuts but banana usually tends to be the base ingredient to achieve the creamy texture. It just happens to be dairy free, gluten free, paleo and added sugar free. And, it is just as decadent-tasting as the real ice cream, but lighter on your digestion. A great alternative for those of you looking for a cold and creamy treat, but would rather avoid the sugar and dairy. And most importantly, it’s easy to make.

perfectly firmed up nice cream

Unlike most ice cream recipes, this one doesn’t require an ice cream maker. The blender or food processor can transform sliced frozen bananas into a soft serve dessert in mere minutes. While it takes some forethought (making time for freezing and chilling) it uses very little technique to get that perfect creamy consistency.

Here are a few simple tips to help you make basic nice Ice cream

• Start with ripe bananas. I don’t like over ripe bananas.
• Peel and slice them into 1-2″ chunks. The smaller the pieces, the easier it is to blend. Breaking your bananas into chunks before freezing them is an essential step.
• Put them in a freezer bag, and keep them flat and separated until they are fully solid(frozen). If you don’t keep them flat and separated the chunks will freeze into a brick that’ll need to be chipped apart before using but by that time they’ll only be good for smoothie, not ice-cream.
• Put the frozen banana chunks and coconut solids to the blender.  Then, blend or pulse until you reach your desired consistency. You might need to really push the mixture down to the blender’s blades and scrape the sides often as there is not a lot of liquid involved ( it will separate into tiny frozen chunks before it becomes a fabulous creamy consistency, so be patient).
• This can be served straight away from the blender as soft serve.  However, you can transfer it from the blender to a loaf pan and freeze for a couple of hours before you’re able to scoop and then enjoy with a drizzle of naturally sweetened hot chocolate sauce!

Enjoy!

Bringing this “Nice” ice cream to the linky CookBlogShare hosted by Monika’s everyday healthy recipes.