How to make your ice cream treats healthier

As puddings go, homemade ice cream is pretty healthy, but there are ways of making your ice cream treats even healthier.

In a lot of cases it’s not just about making the recipe healthier, if you topped up your ice cream with a sugary sauce, you won’t be doing yourself any favours! So, here is to a healthier ice creams!

MORE FROZEN TREATS

• Cherry & Lemon Sorbet >>
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• Traditional Vanilla Ice-Cream >>

Use less sugar

The good news is that you don’t necessarily need sugar for keeping the ice cream structure together and you can swap it for a different type of sugar or reduce it. If you are making fruit sorbet, the sugar can come directly from the fruit and you don’t need to add any more processed sugar.

I’m not very keen on artificial sugars or sweeteners, so I’d rather halved the amount of sugar or used other types of sugar such as coconut sugar, date or carob syrup or even brown sugar.

Swap cream for milk

Most recipes I’ve seen include mainly cream, but you can make ice cream with just milk if you add egg yolk. The egg yolk contains fat and protein, which replaces some of the fat from the cream.

Make fruit sorbets

Leaving the milk and cream behind and you are entering the world of sorbets. Sorbets are made mainly from fruit juices, water, sugar and glucose (which gives them the creaminess). There is no fat and if you ease on the additional sugar, you can have a pretty healthy ice cream.

Make more simplified ice creams

Recently, I’ve seen people making ice creams with alternative ingredients that don’t need to be churned.

These are usually recipes for simple ice creams like Banana & Peanut Butter, where you basically freeze the same amount of bananas and peanut butter and then blitz it in a food processor until smooth and creamy. If you don’t count the time it takes to freeze the ingredients, it takes about 5 minutes to create a delicious cream.

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Swap cream for yoghurt

You can easily make yoghurt popsicles by mixing yoghurt with strawberries or other fruit and pour it into a lollipop mould. Leave it freeze over night and you have a delicious ice cream treat!

Choose your ice cream toppings wiselly

It’s without saying that if you choose very sweet toppings (like caramel, sweets, sugar etc.) you will be adding calories to your ice cream. You can make your own fruit sauces, use melted chocolate or add fresh fruit instead of sweets to your ice cream. You can follow my applesauce recipe and swap the apples for any fruit you like.