Gordon Ramsay’s advice is that the best way to do homemade ice cream is to buy a really good vanilla ice cream then add toppings to it at home. Only, there’s no good dairy-free vanilla ice cream available here. So I decided to do my own. Also, I like the texture of chocolate chips, so I decided to add them during the churning.

This vanilla dairy-free choc-chip ice cream recipe was created out of necessity. I had dabbled at making ice cream at home before, when I lived in China, where there is no such thing as dairy-free ice cream (or even dairy-free sorbet). Every food of western origin gets milk added to the recipe over there. I think they think it makes it more authentic.

I had been a little spoilt living in America for 6 months, where a certain Mr. Ben and Mr. Jerry have created the most incredible range of dairy-free ice creams that are available in every one-horse (and thousand-horse) town I visited. I’m not proud of it but I developed a taste for American dairy-free ice cream. And in the UK, the supply of dairy-free ice cream was reasonable. Even in Malaysia I had no issue getting dairy-free ice cream.

But in Ireland, dairy-free ice cream is overpriced and there’s almost none of it available. Literally over the (non-border) in Strabane I can get 3 ASDA dairy-free imitation Magnums for £1.50 or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough dairy-free ice cream for £2.99 (on offer) or £4.50 (normal price), which I think is quite a lot to pay. But in Ireland? That same tub of cookie dough costs €7! SEVEN EUROS! Seven. Euros. Or as I like to call it, daylight robbery. If you can even find a shop that sells it.

As I am currently pregnant, and it’s summer, I need ice cream like I need air to breathe. My attempts to make ice cream in China were okay, but not great. It turns out those recipes to make ice cream without an ice cream maker are blarney. So, since I am now in a country where it’s harder and more expensive to buy electricals, I decided I needed an ice cream maker. I crunched some numbers and it cost £32 (+ free delivery) for an ice cream maker, which is 4.5 tubs of Ben and Jerry’s at Supervalu prices.

So as long as I make only 2 litres of ice cream with my ice cream maker, it’s paid for itself.

This recipe comes out a little bit less vanilla than I’d like, but it works from ingredients you can find in your local Supervalu, Centra, or most small rural Irish shops (maybe not the local chipper), so I’ve sacrificed a little bit of flavour for making this a recipe you can make ANYWHERE in Ireland.

To vanilla it up some more, you do something with vanilla pods. Good luck finding vanilla pods in the arse end of the West Coast because I couldn’t.

Vanilla choc-chip ice cream recipe

Ingredients:

1 tin coconut milk (the type for making curries)

1 tsp vanilla essence

100g honey or other sweetener (don’t use granulated sugar, it will not dissolve at this temperature)

1 packet of chocolate chips (Sainsbury’s dark chocolate chips were dairy free when I last bought them)

Method:

Refrigerate the coconut milk overnight.

If you have a cheap ice-cream maker without a compressor, freeze the ice cream maker’s bowl according to manufacturer’s instructions (I recommend leaving it in there overnight).

Put the coconut milk, honey and vanilla essence into a blender and blend for 30 seconds (don’t add the chocolate chips yet).

Take the ice cream maker’s bowl out of the freezer, assemble the ice cream maker and add the mixture. Add the chocolate chips to the mixture. Let the mixture churn, it should take 7-12 minutes depending on your ice cream maker.

When the mixture starts to thicken into a texture that’s thicker than a dough but not quite completely solid, turn off the ice cream maker and immediately transfer your mixture to a freezable bowl. I have a pottery bowl with a plastic lid which I brought back from my two years in China. Freeze the mixture for an additional hour or two (or longer) and take out of the freezer for 10 minutes before serving. Makes about 500ml (just under 1 pint) of ice cream.

The biggest mistake I’ve seen people make in the reviews of cheap ice cream makers is they leave the mixture in the machine too long, expecting the machine to freeze it completely. If the mixture gets too hard, the electrics will break. A motor turns the paddles, and it doesn’t know to stop, so even when the mixture gets too hard to mix, the motor will still try and turn the paddles, until something snaps and then your ice cream maker won’t work. So it’s better to take it out a little early and freeze it the rest of the way. Remember, you only need the ice cream maker to churn your mixture, you have a perfectly good freezer that can freeze it (if you don’t have a freezer, you can’t make ice cream this way)!

Ice cream stores for up to 1 month.