One of my favorite things to make through the summer is ice cream. Especially this time of year when it feels like our brains are melting when we come home from the grocery store, much less home from a bike ride. Having a nice little stash of favorite ice cream in the freezer is like money in the bank and this Cardamom-Coconut Ice Cream with Fig + Plum Compote is truly our new favorite.
As you now know, Ayurveda suggests that “all foods can be medicine, and all foods can be poison, and the determining factor is how they’re consumed.”
Which is to say that Ayurveda absolutely sees the playful, decadent, chill factor of a nice ice cream cone. But there a few reasons that this very wise ancient medicine is going to warn you away from ice cream.
If you’re a vata type, ice cream is cold + heavy, and is likely going to bog tender digestive systems down with bloating, gas and brain fog through the hot summer months.
If you’re pitta type, and if you love very sweet or super rich ice creams, these will spike pitta and create heat in the digestive system (even though the cream itself is cold!)
And, if you’re kapha type, y0u already have a moderate amount of heavy coolness in your system and ice cream would be kapha kryptonite, leading to sluggishness, congestion and weight gain if eaten too often.
Not to mention the gums, stabilizers and other non-food ingredients present in most store-bought ice creams that gunk up digestion for everyone!
Welp! What’s an ice cream lover in the heat of summer to do!
There are a few things we can do to make ice cream more helpful for our bodies (and agreeable with Ayurvedic principles.) All of them easy as it turns out, and delicious.
The first thing we can do is trim the dairy. This sounds like a true bummer, but when it comes to this Cardamom-Coconut Ice Cream it’s anything but. Coconut milk, coconut cream, and even almond milk, cashew milk, and other plant milks make lovely “nice creams” when combined with the proper ingredients to make them creamy and thick. By the sheer virtue of these less heavy, less dense ingredients, ice cream made with these dairy-alternatives is easy to eat, digest and love.
When we keep sugar at a minimum, we weirdly sweeten the deal. We don’t need a lot of sugar to make ice cream great, and there are lots of natural and unrefined sweetners that help this process.
Next, adding spices like cardamom and cinnamon help our bodies to maintain bioenergetic heat and to digest ice cream easily. These spices are also what makes both the ice cream and the compote shine here.
Lastly, steering clear of those gnarly gums and additives makes all mouths (and bellies!) happy.
…feels like the first of many sweet farewells to summer. Figs and plums both appear in the later parts of the season, and a simple bowl of ice cream on these hottest days of the year feel like the most appropriate way to celebrate waning sunny days.
Its fresh, light, and tastes like toasted coconut and brown sugar with a subtle hint of mysterious cardamom. It’s truly, pure heaven. And this fig + plum compote! My dream condiment on this ice cream AND toast AND porridge AND everything else until those little juicy figs dry up for fall.
Unlike every other vegan/dairy free ice cream out there my recipe here doesn’t use any gums or stabilizers. Just beautiful, whole ingredients and gorgeous creamy ice cream as a result.
This ice cream uses both coconut milk and coconut cream, both of which I recommend sourcing without added gums or stabilizers (I link my favorite brands in bulk below.) I sweeten it with molasses and coconut sugar, which make it rich in color and flavor without being overly sweet. And, the low glycemic index of both make this an easier sell when you have small people who love ice cream in your house; I feel so good about the minerals, nutrients and cooling properties of this ice cream that I happily feed it to my toddler on a hot day after he’s been crushing laps in the backyard, tiny face red from exertion and joy. He laps this up like there’s nothing sweeter on the planet and really, there isn’t.
One last caveat and that is that you are going to need an ice cream maker to pull this one off. You simply can’t get texture like this without one. I share my favorite model below, and tell you why it’s the most incredible device in my kitchen.
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