Healthy Vanilla Bean Recipe: Vegan Ice Cream

Kindi Lantz September 13, 2018

Healthy Vanilla Bean Recipe Series

Post 1: Easy Vegan Mango Ice Cream with Ceylon Cinnamon and Vanilla from Tahiti

There are so many wonderful vanilla recipes out there; the resulting dishes are sweet, fragrant, earthy, and often times accompanied by a brief feeling of guilt for indulging in sugary desserts and other baked goods. Healthy vanilla bean recipes, though, are a bit harder to come by.

I won’t fault you for enjoying the finest vanilla sweets—I do it too, and they rival chicken soup for the positive effects it has on my soul. But as they say, “everything in moderation”.  The good news is, you can satisfy that craving for the inner beauty of those rich, aromatic beans without adding loads of refined sugars! In our new series, I’ll be developing both sweet and savory healthy vanilla bean recipes with all the goodness of vanilla beans and none of the sugars that often accompany them.

In this series, I’m featuring one of our favorite beans, the Vanilla Tahitensis, an award-winning vanilla bean grown by a single family on the island of Tahiti. These beans stand out from other beans at first glance. They are extremely plump from end-to-end with fragrant oils permeating the pod. World-renowned chefs revel in this particular bean, in its aesthetic appearance and in the unsurpassable flavor contained within. With smooth, floral notes balanced by dark, cherry undertones and an element of sweetness reminiscent of ripe stone fruit, this complex bean is capable of adding an earthy depth to any dish.

Uncovering a healthy vanilla bean recipe for a dessert item can be quite the feat. Does it even exist? Well, it does now because I created one for our readers! I guarantee, if you asked a large group of people to name 5 recipes containing vanilla, every one of them would mention ice cream—vanilla bean ice cream is just such a classic! So, it only makes sense that my first healthy vanilla bean recipe in the series is one for ice cream—not just any ice cream, a vegan mango ice cream with Vanilla Beans from Tahiti and Ceylon Cinnamon from Sri Lanka. Even better, it’s incredibly easy to make and so delicious!

Easy Vegan Mango Ice Cream with Ceylon Cinnamon and Vanilla from Tahiti

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 1 grade A Tahitian vanilla bean 
• 1 Ceylon cinnamon quill
• X ounces frozen mango

Procedure:

1. Pour the almond milk into a small pot.
2. Split the vanilla bean and remove the seeds from the pod using the back side of a knife.
   
   
   
   
3. Whisk the vanilla seeds into the almond milk.
4. Break the cinnamon quill into several pieces and added to the milk and vanilla.
   
   
   
   
5. Turn the heat up to medium-low and simmer the milk mixture for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
   
   
   
   
   
6. Remove the pot from the stove, run it through a strainer to catch any cinnamon quills, allow it to cool, and place it in the refrigerator uncovered until about 5 minutes before you are ready to serve your vegan vanilla ice cream.
7. Place the frozen mango in a food processor and pulse, slowly adding the milk mixture until the mango mixture is the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. Just look at all that vanilla!
   
   
   

Serving Suggestions:

Scoop into a dish and eat it as is or top with your favorite nuts, cacao nibs, and/or any other tasty yet nutritious topping!

In a pinch, you can certainly replace the Vanilla Tahitensis with another variety of vanilla bean but I highly recommend you try these remarkable beans from Tahiti! You can get yours here!