The 3-Minute No-Sugar Ice-Cream

Who doesn’t love ice cream? You back there! Click away, now!

Anyway we love ice cream. During the summer we have some almost every day. But I don’t want to eat mass-produced ice cream mixes with questionable ingredients and 80% whipped air. So, I make my own. But it can be tiresome, if you have to do it 3 times a week, sometimes you don’t have enough time or you’re just bored to break the eggs, cook the custard, melt the chocolate blah blah blah. Sometimes you want your homemade ice cream but all you have is 3 minutes. So I developed this super-fast no-sugar recipe for these times. Instead of sugar I used agave syrup. This runny syrup that comes from the agave plant has a lower glycemic index than other sweeteners and that can’t be a bad thing, if you’re a sweet tooth like I am, or if you’re worried about your total sugar intake. So here is a recipe and I strongly suggest using an ice cream maker.

2 cups (500ml) heavy cream

1 cup (250ml) whole milk

100ml agave syrup

1 tablespoon of vanilla extract (I know the bottle says essence but it’s my homemade extract, I swear)

A whisk

Add-ons (optional)

Whisk everything together. Let cool well in the refrigerator. There are small secrets and big secrets about ice cream making. A small one, but always overlooked, is that your mixture will have to be as chilled as can possibly be. Chilled mixture means it will turn faster into ice cream, which means less ice crystals forming, which means better overall texture, which means yummy. Sometimes I cheat and put the mixture in the freezer for 10 minutes before processing it in the ice cream machine. Anyway… that’s all. Did 3 minutes past? Now let the machine do its work following the instructions that came with it. During the last minutes of the churning you can add the add-ons (duh). How about some “pralines and cream”: caramelized almonds and a few spoons of dulce de leche? Or simple “stracciatella”: melted chocolate dripped over the ice cream machine hole during the last seconds of churning? Or maybe your own “cream’n'cookies”: pick your favorite cookies, roughly chop and add.

Please note: the taste of your ice cream is equivalent to the quality of the ingredients used. I always use fresh organic milk from a small farm and good quality heavy cream (the heavier the better).

 

The Ultimate Kourambies Tutorial

When I search around the web can find all these beautiful gingerbread houses, crafted by talented people and they look so nice and festive, that I am tempted to build one. But gingerbread houses are not a tradition to my mediterranean Christmas heritage and I have no childhood memory of them, or any emotional connection. What I see around me when Christmas time arrives is mountains of traditional Greek Holiday cookies like “kourambies” or “melomakarona”, the smell of them as they cook, the small variations in each years recipe that would make my mother furious with the creator of the recipe, the little success of arranging a mountain of kourambiedes and decorating them with icing sugar… a small snowy mountain. Also Greeks only make these cookies during the holidays, you will rarely see anyone eating kourambies any other time o the year (well maybe except if you’re a tourist ). That makes them even more desirable each holiday season.

But this cookie is a tricky one. It has no special ingredients, it’s the process that gives the unique texture to it. It also depends on the quality of the ingredients you’re using. I’ve eaten (or maybe not eaten at all) many that were just not right. The following recipe doesn’t require special cooking skills but some experience should come in handy. The following recipe is based on a basic recipe by my favorite Greek pastry celebrity chef Stelios Parliaros. My contribution to the recipe is the replacement of almonds for cashews. I tried it last year and I was like: yuuuum, why didn’t anyone thought of it earlier?

So here we go for the ultimate kourambies photo tutorial, where I’ll clear up the confusion surrounding the difficult partsof the process that they don’t usually tell you, like: how much should you beat the butter or exactly what should be the texture of the finished batter? Find the ingredients and more photos and advices on my flickr tutorial.