The other day, I made my first frozen dessert in South Florida: a vegan one that incorporated the essence of fresh mint ...
... from our apartment complex's community herb garden:
The mint, of unknown variety or varieties, completely fills the middle bed. Several other types of herbs, including rosemary, dill, parsley, and basil, reside in the other beds.
When my husband, Tony, and I lived in Hunterdon County, New Jersey—for about a year and eight months, after having left Manhattan in August 2015—I started up a company called Huge Hound Frozen Desserts LLC. (The website, which I put together myself, is here.) By that time, I'd been whipping up dairy ice creams for more than 15 years, first using the kind of ice cream maker that utilizes a chemical-filled metal canister you have to store in the freezer and then using the more-advanced, self-contained kind that needs only to be plugged in.
My friend Dan once referred to me as an "ice cream maven." I'm using a variation of that description above in the tag line for this website.
I began making dairy-free FDs after I met Tony, because he can't eat milk or cream (or gluten or legumes). The first year we dated, I focused on sorbets. My favorite was Concord grape, but I also remember making (two) very good ones from mint and watermelon. Later, I whipped up some delicious FDs using coconut milk as the base, including one flavored with lime basil.1 (Like I wrote in my first post and will no doubt write in many more posts here, if you want the password to my other, long-running, personal blog, which would allow you to read the two linked posts above, just shoot me an email at bill@billhawley.net.)
I've never been the hugest fan of coconut (though I'm not a hater), and I didn't necessarily want that flavor mixed in with the chocolate or lemon verbena or whatever I intended to be my primary flavoring ingredient(s), so when I started Huge Hound, one of my main goals was to create a vegan-frozen-dessert base that was as neutral tasting as possible.
And I did it. My ingredients were hemp and flax milks; refined coconut oil, which had had its coconut flavor removed during processing; agave syrup; and small amounts of lecithin, xanthan gum, and arrowroot, which thickened and emulsified the fatty-and-sweet mixture. Plus a pinch of salt. On principle, I would have preferred to avoid using the much-trifled-with RCO, but I found I really needed the boost of fat it provided; the nondairy milks on their own weren't rich enough to produce a creamy-textured product.
After I'd been selling my VFDs and ice creams for a while, I began thinking about ways to cut costs, so the last time I made a Huge Hound VFD, which was flavored with chocolate and ginger, I used only flax milk, because hemp milk is significantly more expensive. Hemp milk is also more strongly flavored than flax milk, so eliminating it as an ingredient improved the neutrality of my base.
I was somewhat sorry to ditch the hemp milk, though, because I think hemp is an amazing plant that we should be using in many different ways, including in foods, paper, and plastics. But I just learned when I was buying my ingredients to make my Chocolate-Mint VFD that I have another good reason for giving it up: One of the two major makers of hemp milks, Pacific Foods, is now putting a warning on its labels telling its customers that its hemp-based nondairy beverages shouldn't be considered gluten-free:
I had been using Living Harvest's Tempt-brand hemp milk for my Huge Hound VFDs, and its packaging contains no such warning. Maybe Living Harvest is confident in its ability to prevent cross-contamination with wheat, but I didn't want to take that chance, so when I made this latest VFD a couple weeks ago, I again used only flax milk.
I applaud Pacific Foods for erring on the side of caution at the risk of losing customers. People like Tony who have serious dietary issues need and appreciate candor from manufacturers and restaurants so they can make informed decisions.
Once at the Union Square outpost of Whole Foods, a woman standing near me complained that the package of dried fruit she was holding was labeled as being gluten-free. "How stupid do they think we are?" she asked. I just wanted to get in and out of the store and wasn't really in the mood for a teachable moment, so I didn't explain to her that manufactured foods can be contaminated with things like tree nuts, peanuts, dairy, and gluten based on how they're processed, not only by the ingredients they obviously contain.
A case in point: Tony and I just got back from our local supermarket, and we had to go with the third brand of walnuts we picked up because the first two said they could contain traces of gluten. (He's making Chicken With Walnut Sauce for dinner tonight.)
The other day, at the same store, I put a bag of pine nuts back on its hook because the packaging said the PNs were "produced on shared equipment with peanuts, tree nuts, milk, wheat, soy & egg." The only things missing from the list of the big eight food allergens were fish and shellfish.
OK, let me reel myself back in *sound of fishing line being respooled* and post a photo of my finished VFD:
Our dinner guests three nights later—Tony's longtime friend Marchéta and her wife, Uli, who live in the next county north of here—went back for seconds or thirds. I hadn't lost my touch.
1In that same linked post, you can see I still made dairy ice creams for my own enjoyment, including the Gooseberry With Gooseberry Swirl that was one of my favorites of all time. And I kept experimenting with sorbets, culminating in the Chocolate-Blackberry that may be my favorite FD ever.
An UPDATE the next day:
That's the out-of-this-world dinner Tony made last night, with the chicken-and-walnut stew served over GF pasta with additional, chopped walnuts. The herb on top is cilantro—from the grocery store, because there's none growing in the community garden.
An UPDATE two days later: My friend Desirée sent me a link to this New York Times story about vegan frozen desserts, which has a sidebar on a VFD base that uses hemp (or cashew) milk, coconut cream or milk, and agave (or corn) syrup.