Roasted Banana Ice Cream
Calling this one a do over.
It turns out I wasn’t all that happy with the Bananas Foster ice cream I made back in January. The idea was sound, and the flavors tasted good when the ice cream was fresh out of the machine. But ultimately, the bananas foster mix in came out too icy, and what’s worse, it was unevenly distributed throughout the ice cream to an extreme degree. In that week’s post, I claimed the ice cream was “pure deliciousness,” but that claim didn’t hold up on day two.1
It occurred to me then that it might have been better to just blend the bananas foster in with the rest of the dairy so it was only consistent flavor and texture. Well, it turns out that David Lebovitz has a recipe that calls for doing exactly that: roasted banana ice cream.
Some of you may be familiar with the one ingredient banana ice cream recipes that are quite popular across the internet.2 Lebovitz’s recipe is far more involved than that..but it is a very easy recipe nonetheless as you basically just blend everything together after roasting the bananas. Here are the ingredients:
First step: roast the bananas. You slice ‘em up and mix them with 1/3 cup of brown sugar and 1 tablespoon of butter. The recipe called for light brown sugar, but I only had dark brown on hand, so I used that. Whatevs. I can’t imagine it would actually make all that much of a difference, especially when the whole thing is just gonna get blended together anyway.
When it finishes roasting, you dump the bananas into a blender along with 1.5 cups of milk, 2 tablespoons of sugar, a 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract and 1.5 tsps of lemon juice.
Then blend…
And with that, the mix is done. I let it sit in the fridge overnight.
My kids and I tasted some of it right out of the machine. My son said it tasted like banana bread, which I took as a compliment.
After letting it harden overnight, it scooped fairly easily straight out of the freezer. The taste was good…similar to the bananas foster batch but more consistently banana flavored. I think my son’s comparison to banana bread is an apt description.
The texture was also good, but was a smidge dry, a fact I attributed to the banana puree. Perhaps I should have let the bananas ripen more before roasting them.
Tonight, I had another serving of it, this time with a scoop of the remaining strawberry ice cream from last week. It was, unsurprisingly, an excellent combination!
That’s all for now. See you next week, when I’ll be making some homemade Cherry Garcia ice cream3 as a prize for Adrian and his family for winning the TOIC.
It was too late to go back and change the post, so I just left it as is.
When I lived in Queens, there was this one time when I almost blew out the motor on this cheap blender we owned trying to make one ingredient banana ice cream. The final product still tasted good though.
I’m also planning on making some date ice cream this week, but I won’t be posting about it until June when I’m on vacation.