Looking through my recipes, I can see that they could be criticised for containing ingredients that may be hard to find, depending on where you live. Even for me living in Melbourne, a large city with a lot of access to interesting ingredients, some of them require a trip to a specialty store. I’m hoping that most people will be able to find the ingredients online, at the very least (well, the non-perishable ones, anyway!).

Still, for those unable to acquire everything I list (or unable to acquire it at a reasonable price), knowledge of what is necessary and what can be replaced or omitted is worthwhile. This is why I’ve written up a list of the ingredients I generally recommend along with a discussion of what will happen if you omit them or what you can substitute them with.

I also want to discuss the ingredients I use in more general terms. Different products are quite naturally going to have slightly different properties: in particular, something which is vegan here in Australia might not be elsewhere due to common animal-derived additives, and where I’m aware of these differences I want to notify people. Right now, the only ingredient that falls under that category is sugar, which I’ll discuss in more detail later.

Milk

Soy vs Almond vs Oat etc…

I personally use oat milk as the base for all my vegan ice-creams, primarily because I feel that, of the common plant-based milk products I’ve compared it to (namely soy milk and almond milk), it has the flavour that best complements the rest of the ice cream. This is naturally just a personal preference, but I do imagine my recipes will suit oat milk (specifically oat milk with extra fat ) marginally better than other plant-based milks. Still, you should be able to substitute them fairly freely in all my recipes without too much hassle.

I have found that, when making vegan whipped cream, the higher-fat oat milk I use whips up better than other milks, including soy (which has been noted to contain some natural emulsifiers). In my experiments with soy and oat milk containing different levels of added protein I have found the oat consistently whipped far easier than the soy (which frankly didn’t whip at all, though I know it’s possible from what I’ve seen from other people). This is possibly due to the dipotassium phosphate which the brand I use (Oatly Barista 3%) includes to act as an emulsifier.

If you’re using a plant-based milk without added fat, feel free to just add a little extra vegetable or canola/rapeseed oil to the ice cream base to compensate – 7 grams for each 1% fat less then the 3% target mark. This difference won’t hugely affect your end product.

What about Coconut Milk?

Coconut milk is a bit different from other plant milks. I’ve observed two types of it out in the wild; one is the canned variety that you might use in cooking, but I’ve also seen coconut milk meant to be used as a dairy milk or plant-based milk alternative. The latter I’ve not tried before, though I imagine it would be fine if you want a coconut-y flavour, but the former tends to have some notable differences from other milks. Firstly, it’s far higher in fat (which is why it’s thicker) than what one would typically use as a ‘milk’. Just checking a couple of the products available at the local supermarket here, I’ve seen a range from 6 to 18% fat. This is so far out of the range of our typical plant-based milk that you’d really have to bend the whole recipe around incorporating it. This is absolutely doable, and I’ve seen and enjoyed coconut milk-based ice-cream. However, this is when coconut milk is meant to be a major component of the ice cream, contributing heavily to its flavour profile. I’ll design some recipes around coconut milk in the future, but for when you want a chocolate ice cream and not a choc-coconut ice cream I’d avoid it.

Fat Sources (Oils)

Coconut Oil – Refined vs Unrefined

I’ve typically found refined coconut oil far harder to find than unrefined, but thankfully the only differences between them are flavour, with refined coconut oil essentially being odourless and flavourless. I exclusively use refined coconut oil because I want it to perform a purely structural and textural role without a coconut flavour, though if you can only find unrefined (or unspecified, which probably is unrefined) coconut oil, it’ll still work if you don’t mind the taste.

Neutral Oil: Vegetable Oil, Canola/Rapeseed Oil, etc (the more liquid oils)

I’m referring to these oils as the ‘more liquid’ ones, because coconut oil has a melting point low enough that it might be liquid or solid depending on your weather, but these oils will always be liquids. What I’m talking about here are the oils frequently just listed in recipes as ‘neutral oils’, so you know – the type of oil you might fry something in. Grapeseed oil, sunflower oil, certain types of olive oil (light and not virgin oil, specifically), peanut oil, avocado oil and any others I’ve forgotten (or failed to find in a 30 second google search) also fall into this category. All you really need is an oil that is comfortably liquid even at colder temperatures.

In a typical recipe, I use some neutral oil to replicate the effects of some of the fats in dairy products with a lower melting point; a recipe that includes a slight amount of neutral oil will be creamier. Leaving them out is perfectly fine but seeing as neutral oils are the most accessible (and often cheapest) of the fats there’s no real need to unless you just ran out that day. Just replace them 1 to 1 with more coconut oil if you don’t have them on hand.

As for substituting the other way around, I’ve actually not tried it yet. Perhaps something for future experiments? Honestly, I’m kind of curious now… I think it’ll affect the mouth feel and maybe make it feel oily? Or maybe it’ll melt differently?

Cocoa Butter

I use unrefined cocoa butter to substitute for some of the coconut oil in chocolatey recipes to deepen their flavour. Cocoa butter melts at a fairly high temperature relative to our other fats and tends to make the ice cream perhaps a little more ‘rigid’. It also has a very strong flavour, so I don’t use much. There is also refined cocoa butter but don’t bother with it, it loses all those chocolatey notes and coconut oil is (marginally) better for the texture anyway. While great in chocolate ice creams, in non-chocolate recipes cocoa butter tends to dominate the other flavours with some notes that I personally don’t enjoy too much in isolation – it’s a little uncanny valley to me personally, as it’s kind of chocolatey but also very different. However, if you enjoy it, feel free to use it.

If you can’t find it (and it is a bit of a rare ingredient) just do a 1 for 1 substitution with coconut oil. It may be possible to use refined cocoa butter in place of refined coconut oil if you can’t find the latter, but in my experience refined coconut oil is easier to find and the melting point is more in line with what we want for what is the bulk of the fat anyway.

Using less fat in general

While fat does have a structural purpose to some extent, its main purpose is textural (for more detail, read my section on ice cream composition). Italian gelato, for example, has far less fat than a standard ice cream, and is still quite pleasant! If you want, you can freely halve the amount of fat in my recipes and still have a pretty good ice cream, it’ll just be more like gelato – denser and a bit less creamy. Fat levels are definitely a great thing to experiment with if you want to see how the resulting ice cream changes when you adjust an ingredient.

Sugars

Sugars, on the other hand, play a very important structural role. In the absence of sugar, your ice cream will be a good chunk of the way to being a solid block of ice. While fats and proteins absorb some water, the sugar in the ice cream handles the bulk of it.

White sugar (sucrose)

The key problem with sugar is that in America, many white sugars incorporate some animal products as additives. However, this is not an invariable fact of life, and there are sugar brands that don’t do so – if you can find one of these, then you’re golden. If you can’t get a hold of vegan white sugar, raw sugars are still mostly sucrose and should work fine. Various shades of brown sugars are also mostly sucrose, to my knowledge are invariably vegan, and will substitute for plain white sugar pretty well, though some of the darker ones maybe have too much molasses to substitute 1 to 1. But honestly, these are still 90% sucrose no matter what, so just add in a few extra grams if you want the same level of sweetness as white sugar. Naturally, using raw or brown sugars will add a mild molasses flavour to your ice cream, but frankly to me that just sounds pleasant (and leaves me wondering if I should experiment with it…)

Glucose/Dextrose

Getting your hands on glucose might be tricky, though I’ve had no huge trouble finding it at various health food stores around my city. If you can’t find it, substituting glucose with sucrose will result in a sweeter ice cream that’s not as soft, but still perfectly passable. Incorporating some alcohol (no more than a tablespoon) can help compensate for a lack of dextrose. You can make your ice cream softer by including more sucrose, but at that point it’s probably going to be too sweet.

Other sugar substitutes

I’ve seen many recipes use other sweeteners such as maple syrup or agave nectar in plant-based products as an alternative to white sugar, but this approach is quite sub-optimal for our purposes. Maple syrup is decently sucrose-rich, but also contains a fair amount of water. This means you’re not just adding in enough syrup to compensate for the water already in your ice-cream base, but also enough to deal with the water in the syrup, and I don’t know about the rest of the world but maple syrup is expensive here in Australia! I like Canadians, but I don’t want to pour all my money into maple syrup by using half a bottle for every batch of ice cream. As a flavour additive it’s great, and I’ll definitely be doing a maple syrup ice cream, but as a sugar substitute it has glaring issues for me. For agave nectar all the points apply (just without the bit about Canadians).

Reducing the amount of sugar

As a general rule of thumb, don’t. If you’re finding it a bit too sweet, increase the ratio of dextrose to sucrose (for every 2 grams of sucrose you remove, add in 1 gram of dextrose), or perhaps even toast the sugar, but with sugar you cannot get away with the sort of radical reductions that are workable with fat content without significantly compromising the texture of the ice cream.

Stabilisers

Substituting different types of stabilisers

So, the most important thing to note is that different stabilisers are all going to be fairly effective, but are needed in different amounts. I exclusively use xanthan gum, but I’ve tried guar gum before and found that if I used the quantity which is standard for xanthan gum it’d actually thicken the ice cream too much! So I just halved the amount of guar gum I was using and the end product was perfectly fine. I know Nick Palumbo at Gelato Messina uses different stabilisers for different situations (preferring guar for dairy-based gelatos), and I’m definitely down for experimenting with this factor, but all in all I find xanthan gum perfectly serviceable.

Omitting Stabilisers

If you can’t get your hands on any stabilisers at all, omitting them is okay, but far from ideal. Your base won’t be very thick, and the ice cream will be more solid and become icier over time.

Protein

I used to use pea protein as an added element but found that it added an unpleasant aftertaste to my recipes. Right now I have no added protein in my recipes, but I am curious if adding more would give them more overrun.

In Summary

All in all, I’ve mentioned quite a few ingredients here that can be omitted or substituted, but I think what’s key is that all these elements add a bit to the finished product. Making one or two changes probably won’t affect things too much, but obviously the more you cut, the more you lose.

I think what I’d like to do is more experiments with cutting out various ingredients independently and trying them side by side, but seeing as I can only make one batch a day with my churner and all ice creams will change with time in the freezer, it’s hard to guess how valid any comparison  would be – side by side comparisons are flawed as one batch will have had extra freezing time and any comparisons between batches over time are relying on my memory.

Finally, I’d like to see what is the most accessible but still good quality vegan ice cream I can make. What happens if I just use vegetable oil instead of all the other fats? Or just white sugar? I’d have to see how much demand I have for more simplified recipes or what ingredients readers are having trouble finding!