How To: Guilt-Free One Ingredient Ice Cream

By L. Stolpman in Food on Sep 10, 2009 4:00PM

The moment we saw this article on Lifehacker which referenced this article on The Kitchn (both of which contain pictures worth seeing), we knew we'd be trying it. Now, we know what you're thinking...obviously it isn't ice cream in the literal sense of the term. But we found that it is surprisingly pretty darn good.

How do you make it? Simple. Peel and freeze some ripe bananas. Then put them in a food processor and give it a go; we had to push down the banana bits a few times. After a while, we had a creamy, smooth blend. (See step-by-step instructions on Instructables here. We grabbed a spoon and sampled. It was much more creamy than we'd expected. It was only then that we decided to take a picture so our sample has softened quite a bit in that picture (again, we recommend you take a peek at the articles to see better pictures!). Ours was similar to soft-serve which was, admittedly, partly due to being over-eager to try this out and not letting our bananas harden to rocks in the freezer. heh.

The nicest surprise was that it wasn't overwhelmingly....banana-y. This was most likely because there was not that artificial banana taste that tends to linger on the tongue. It was clean and light. The articles mention the possibility of adding vanilla, honey, or peanut butter to the mix and blending it together for a different flavor combination. We also recommend that you do this with no less than 4 bananas. This worked well enough that we think our 3-year old niece would be happy to sit down with a bowl of this 'ice cream' and would never know the difference. Far healthier dessert, without a doubt. If you give this a try, let us know how it goes, any additional tips you may have, and what flavor variations worked!