29 July 2009

Maple Vanilla Walnut Ice Cream

In general I think it's a huge mistake to go for low-carb versions of high-carb foods (more about that in a future post), but ice cream is a great weakness of mine, plus ice cream has a good low-carb foundation (unlike, say, bread). So I borrowed Hyperlipid's ice cream recipe. Can't get double cream here, so heavy/whipping cream had to do. I used 1 pint heavy cream, 6 egg yolks, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, and 2 Tbsp maple syrup. I prefer grade B maple syrup but seems impossible to get now, so grade A it was. It was quite good. It will not taste sweet at all if you're not already used to being sugar-free, but was fine for me. Something like 40g carbs for the whole thing, and easily feeds two people with a high tolerance for rich ice cream. My oldest and I split it. We made it again a couple days later, this time throwing in (at the end) a heap of chopped walnuts. Even better!

7 comments:

KnuckleSplitter said...

Another good (and easy) low-carb dessert item that has a "low-carb foundation" is sugar-free heavy whipping cream (in a squirt can). I put it on low-carb chocolate ice cream, sugar-free jello, and 85+% chocolate bars - lol.

I am interested in your future post on low-carb versions of high-carb foods.

There are some commercial low-carb ice creams that are pretty good and don't contain that awful Maltitol sugar alcohol. Breyers chocolate is pretty yummy.

Have you tried the "chips" made out of baked cheese? Pretty good for nice fatty dips.

pyker said...

In the UK we've got double cream, of which you can get a pourable version or a very thick version. Wonderful stuff.

I've not seen cheese chips.

zim said...

the south beach books have some reasonably good low carb desserts, mostly involving vanilla/eggs/lemon. and a blender.

the ice cream sounds quite good, Ron, and my boss mentioned the other day that breyer's is now doing a no-sugar-added ice cream that he'll bring in for the next Ice Cream Friday.

i figure i'll throw some hunks of dark chocolate on a small-ish portion and be good to go.

pyker said...

Those Breyer's ice creams look fairly low fat and full of artificial sweeteners. I prefer the tactic of pulling no punches on the fat content and ending up with a richer product that's simply not that sweet.

KnuckleSplitter said...

Agreed on the Breyer's Low Carb (different than just no-sugar-added) but it seems much richer than regular ice cream. I bet there are better low-carb ice creams somewhere out there, but it is my favorite that I can get at a regular grocery store. Also I don't seem to react too badly to artificial sweeteners.

zim said...

egads -- i just looked at the ingredient list for the so-called "carb smart" breyer's products.

what happened to breyer's being the brand w/o the additives? (ah, just found the answer on the wikipedia page on them).

sorely disappointed here -- my boss made it seem like "no sugar added" was, "cream, milk, fruit," not the monstrosity i see it is.

zim said...

per Matt's comment, i see there is a separate "no sugar added" line. my bad.

still, that ingredient list isn't much better than the low carb one. kinda BS to imply "no sweeteners added." guess i shouldn't've assumed.