This summer, while fresh berries and stone fruits have been in season, I’ve been churning out the Vegan Frozen Desserts and perfecting recipes for my cookbook, which I plan to have completed in time for next summer. (Of course, here in South Florida, we almost always have weather suitable for eating frozen desserts.)
Inspired by the Raspberry Sauce you can see in my Peach Melba VFD in the photo above, I’ve decided to include a section on fruit sauces that can be swirled into or drizzled on top of my VFDs. The other two VFDs in that pic are Plumcot (bottom left) and Blueberry Lime (bottom right).
My raspberry, blackberry, and plum sauces are all on point, but my Blueberry Sauce still needs some work. Many food websites claim blueberries are low in pectin, but I call bullshit on that assertion. Bullshit! Blueberries gel quickly when puréed in a blender with lime juice, for my VFD recipe, or cooked on the stove with agave and a small amount of lemon juice, for the sauce. My first attempt at Blueberry Sauce resulted in something with a texture more like blueberry jelly, so my next attempt will incorporate some water.
In the above photo, you can see my Vanilla VFD topped with Plum Sauce. In the photo below are my Blackberry Sauce, my churned Chocolate VFD, and the two being combined in a container to make Chocolate Vegan Frozen Dessert With Blackberry Swirl.
That flavor pairing was inspired by a Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet I used to make for fun and then produced on a larger scale for Huge Hound, the frozen dessert business I had in New Jersey before Tony and I moved to America’s mullet.
I’ve also been experimenting with an ingredient substitution: ubiquitous and cheap cornstarch for harder-to-find and somewhat expensive arrowroot. I didn’t like how one batch of Blackberry VFD turned out with the cornstarch, but the second batch turned out fine though maybe not quite as smooth as with the arrowroot. And the cornstarch has performed no differently than the arrowroot every other time I’ve used it, including in the Vanilla VFD. Cornstarch can be bought for less than $2 a pound at any grocery store while the lowest price I found for arrowroot online, not including the cost of delivery, was $4.69 a pound.
I prefer to avoid ingredients made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) whenever possible, and Argo Corn Starch, the brand I used in my experiments, is made from GMO corn. And that’s not terribly surprising given that at least 90% of the corn grown in the U.S. is genetically engineered.
Of course, a very small percentage of people are allergic to corn. And some are so allergic, they can’t consume xanthan gum, which is produced from a bacteria that is typically grown on corn. That makes me think, since I want my recipes to be safe for as many people as possible, I should try using guar gum as a substitute for the xanthan gum.
At this time, I don’t plan on trying out substitutes for refined coconut oil, agave, or powdered sunflower lecithin. The coconut oil produces a creamy texture without any residual flavor of coconut. And even though agave is pretty expensive compared with other sweeteners, switching to a dry ingredient from a liquid would require more reformulating than I’m prepared to do at this time. Maybe in a follow-up book, I’ll remake all my recipes using zero-calorie Stevia or sugar and I’ll see whether a cheaper oil would do in a pinch.
As for the lecithin, I just took a deep internet dive into the use of the liquid kind versus the powdered kind. They aren’t interchangeable, even if you use different amounts of them. I learned the liquid kind should be reserved for things that are mostly fat, while the powdered kind is better for things that are mostly water, like my VFD base. The soy lecithin we see listed as an ingredient in chocolate chips and candies is almost certainly liquid lecithin that prevents the fat from separating out.
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Although I’m confident my recipes work, I would still like some other home cooks to test them. If you’re interested in being a recipe tester, please email me at bill@billhawley.net. And if you’re not but know someone who might be, please share this post with them. Anyone who tests at least two recipes for me will get a thank you in the cookbook and a free copy.