Berry Ice Cream! Guilt shut up! This is Healthy!

Berry ice cream! Enjoy a super delicious, quick and easy to make summer treat that is healthy enough to enjoy daily!

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Beat The Heat

Some like their ice-cold soda to cool down in summer, I like my ice cream. Make that I LOVE my ice cream. And ice cream can be very healthy too. It can be full of vitamins, probiotics and antioxidants. So good for you that you should eat it everyday, just to stay healthy. Well, that’s probably a little over the top, but honestly, when it’s ninety out, there is nothing better to cool down with. And if you choose your ingredients wisely, it truly can be good for you.

And no! I do not like commercial soda and have not had it much in my life. I do not enjoy the flavor, and find it extremely unappealing to imagine loading up on massive amounts of GMO corn syrup and food coloring. However, I do like some low-sugar natural sodas such as homemade ginger beer or water kefir. More on that in future posts. Stay tuned and sign up to receive my newsletter with updates.

So what do I do when it gets hot and I start to overheat? I head for the freezer and get ice cream. Or maybe I should call it ice milk. I own goats and in goats milk, the cream is all mixed in. So I use just plain whole milk, the way it comes out of the udder. 

Goats milk is very tasty and creamy and it makes excellent ice cream. Even just plain with some vanilla and honey or maple syrup. But when I add some smashed fruit to the ice cream, it is fit for royalty.

Here is what you need to make fantastic berry ice cream

This ice cream is pretty simple and quick to make. I don’t fuzz with making a custard most of the time, except when I make coffee ice cream. But for a quick summer treat, I just mix up the ingredients, and let them churn for a few minutes in the ice cream maker. Yes I own one! It gets a lot of use and so I consider it a worthy purchase! And that’s all it takes. About 10 minutes getting the ingredients and mixing, 15 minutes of churning and unfortunately another 10 minutes of clean up time. I hate that part, but it’s worth it too.

Keep in mind that your choice of ingredients will either make ice cream a healthy treat or it can make it quite detrimental for you. So choose wisely if you eat a lot of ice cream and if you want it to be healthy.

Tools for Berry Ice Cream

• Blender or Potato masher. Best tool here is a Vitamix but my Hamilton Beach budget blender works pretty well too. If you don’t have a blender, a potato masher will work too, but your berries may not break up so well and you might end up with frozen berry clumps in your ice cream. Which could be a good thing or not depending on what you like. 
• ½ cup measure to measure out the sweetener and cream.
• Wooden spoon or tamper I use this to push the frozen berries into the blades between pulses. And the spoon can be used to mix the ingredients if you don’t have a blender.
• Ice Cream Maker You can make ice cream without an ice cream maker, however, I like the convenience of having one, it’s quicker, and the ice cream comes out better in my opinion. And I don’t have to be patient and nurse my cravings for too long. 15 minutes is all it takes. But without the ice cream maker, you can freeze the recipe and stir it every 30 minutes or so until it is firm.

Ingredients for Berry Ice Cream

2 cups of goat’s milk or 1 ½ cup of any milk and ½ cup of cream. 

Here is the scoop: Goats milk does not separate like cows milk. Because I have goats and this is what is available to me, I just use whole goats milk. However, do use cows milk if you have it, even pasteurized works fine. But be aware that fresh, raw, pasture raised milk has a lot more health benefits.

If you want a special treat, mix in ½ cup of heavy cream in place of ½ cup of the milk. I do that on rare occasions when I use organic heavy cream in a recipe and have some left over. It does elevate the flavor and feel of the ice cream to a higher level.

Lactose intolerance

Goats milk is very easy to digest, even for many people who are lactose intolerant. It is always A2/A2 gene milk and if you can get it raw, it is full of probiotics and antioxidants. Do also look for grass fed. Grass fed dairy, either cow, goat, or sheep milk will be much superior health-wise than grain fed.

Ruminants are not meant to consume grain and it will alter the pH of their stomach to where their milk can become indigestible for many people. The high rate of lactose intolerance in people could easily be traced back to not only the A1 Beta gene but also what the dairy animal has been fed. So if you’re lactose intolerant, you could try A2/A2 pastured cows milk or goats milk and might find it tolerable.

One other thing you can try is to use buttermilk, bonny clabber or kefir instead of regular milk. It is more easily digestible, contains very little lactose and has lots of probiotics. Besides that it adds a pleasant tang. I prefer adding some buttermilk just because of the flavor. It’s so yummy and extra healthy.

A word on the cream. Many ice cream recipes suggest you use 2 cups of cream, not milk. I prefer just ½ cup of cream and 1½ cups of milk if I want to splurge. This makes a very tasty, creamy ice cream but it won’t leave a greasy film in your mouth when you eat it. And I don’t think it’s necessary to have all that extra fat in it if it tastes so good a little lighter, especially on a hot day.

½ cup of maple syrup, honey or evaporated cane juice crystals (raw natural unrefined sugar) 

I love maple syrup, but I don’t make it myself from scratch, and it can be expensive. I do get it from Costco occasionally and when I have it it’s my preferred sweetener for ice cream. Honey is available locally, but it’s expensive too and if I use it, I like to choose raw honey for the health benefit.

If I get honey, I usually get a gallon of it at a time, which cuts costs and honey will store forever! back when the kids were little, I’d get 5 gallon buckets and that cost about as much then, as 1 gallon does now. Yikes! Time to get bee hives, right? Liquid sweetener is supposed to make ice cream more scoop-able in the case that it sits in the freezer for a while, but I didn’t find that it made a difference.

So when I’m on a budget, I use organic evaporated cane juice crystals. I do not ever use refined grocery store sugar that is made using GMO beets or even worse, corn syrup.

If you use sugar, and you want to take a healthy approach to eating, I strongly advise going with only real evaporated cane juice and choosing organic. Commercial beets are GMO and they, and sugar cane get a lot of pesticide treatments. This is one reason why so many field workers, who are employed in sugar cane fields are tragically struck with kidney failure. Glyphosate use on our food is a serious and often underrated problem and cane sugar as well as beet sugar, which is what regular grocery store sugar is made of, are high in pesticide content. 

1 ½ cups fresh or frozen Berries

I usually have an assortment of Berries in the freezer. During berry season, I love to find some organic or no-spray local berry fields and load up weekly on what I can find there, and that I am not growing enough of in my garden. Raspberries, strawberries and blueberries are my favorites. Blackberries are often available wild, and can be more than abundant in some locations. I eat a lot of all the berries fresh and any extras go into the freezer. 

Pick your favorite of what you have available and even better, mix a few varieties. I do advise you to find organic berries. Most commercial berries are on the EWG’s top dirty dozen list for pesticide use. And I can attest to the truth of that, having lived in north west WA, in a prime berry growing area.

So many times I was driving to work and there were crop duster airplanes flying overhead, releasing their deadly poisons over the miles of berry fields lining the highway. Even on days of harvesting. Later on my way home from work, workers were in the fields harvesting those berries. I still shudder, thinking about it.

So be safe and choose organic or grow your own!

Time to make ice cream

Make your ice cream by blending the berries first with the maple syrup or sugar. If necessary, add a little milk or cream to make it blend easier. Once it’s smooth, add the rest of the milk and blend for just a moment. You don’t want to introduce a lot of foam. 

Time to churn some ice cream!

And that is it already. If you have an ice cream maker, follow the directions to make icecream with it. It’s super good straight from the ice cream maker, but if you like it a little firmer, scoop it into a storage container and freeze it for a few hours first. 

If you have leftover ice cream, it will become very hard in the freezer. What I like to do the next day, or when I’m going to eat more, I take it out of the freezer and let it sit in the refrigerator for an hour. This will soften it evenly and make it a nice consistency for eating. If you leave it on the counter, some of it will melt while some will stay pretty hard frozen. Not as good.

If you like this recipe, I’d appreciate a 5 star review and let me know in the comments below how you like it. Berry ice cream is my favorite on a hot day, I’m thinking you might agree.

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Vitamix
Hamilton Beach blender
Cuisinart ice cream maker
Raw honey 
Maple Syrup
Organic evaporated cane juice crystals