I’ve added two new recipes to my repertoire: Cookies & Cream Vegan Frozen Dessert and a VFD, or Vegan Sherbet, as I prefer to call it, made from pink lemons. I also used a new, cheaper, and more widely available ingredient in both of those recipes, and it worked perfectly. But I’ll wait until the end of the post to reveal it so as to keep you in sus … … … … … pense.
I never attempted a C&C frozen dessert—neither vegan nor dairy—for Huge Hound. But given the popularity of this flavor, I figured I ought to have a recipe for it in my cookbook.
It seemed like way too much work, both for me and the purchasers of my cookbook, to have to make the chocolate sandwich cookies that would be incorporated into the VFD, so I’d been searching grocery and health food stores for a suitable candidate. Most had one or more ingredients that turned me off, though I understand this kind of cookie isn't about eating clean. It's a treat, like VFDs.
I came across Gluten Free Oreos for the first time in a larger Publix store in Fort Lauderdale, where I was looking for some products our smaller Publix here in Wilton Manors doesn't carry. I found out online this variation on the ubiquitous cookie has been available only since early 2021.1
My Cookies & Cream VFD was a big hit with my friends Gerry and Ron, but it unfortunately made my sweetie Tony sick, apparently because of the oat flour in the Oreos.
Oats can be a crap shoot for people with celiac disease, which I'm going to abbreviate to PWCD. Some scientists and dietitians swear oats are perfectly safe for PWCD if they’re certified to be gluten-free. (Contamination from wheat used to be an insurmountable problem because oats and wheat were inevitably stored and transported together, but now some small portion of oats are kept separate to avoid contamination.) But a study by researchers from Spain and Australia found that certain oat varieties contain storage proteins2 that trigger the same type of reaction as gluten in some PWCD. And that’s what apparently happened to my guy, who uses an oat-based, nondairy product in his coffee without any problem.
I was really pleased with how the C&C VFD turned out. It's been ages since I've had a "regular" Oreo. The GF ones were enjoyable enough on their own and held up well when crumbled and frozen in my vanilla extract–flavored VFD.
My Lemon Vegan Sherbet, shown in the photo at the top of this post, came out a pale yellow, even though the juice I used to make it was pink. The lemon flavor was strong but not overwhelming, and as with other citrus-based VSes I've made, the levels of tartness and sweetness were nicely balanced. Even though I've got a sweet tooth as big as a (crowded) house, I sometimes appreciate desserts that are less sugary.
I'd bought a small package of pink lemons from Miami Fruit—my source for the chocolate pudding fruits—at the Vegan Block Party in Fort Lauderdale last month.3 I was hoping to score some mangosteens, which were crazy expensive when bought in a shippable quantity from MF's website, but the woman who waited on me at the stand said their season had just ended.
To ensure I'd have a cup of juice for my recipe, I bought two bags of pink lemons from our local Sprouts to supplement the three lemons I got from MF. Juicing the fruit is the most time-consuming part of making a sherbet, but the payoff is worth the effort.
Because refined coconut oil was difficult to find for many weeks because of supply chain problems—and also because it's always been rather expensive compared with other oil options—I tried replacing the coconut oil with canola oil in both of these VFDs. I didn't notice any difference at all in terms of either texture or flavor. They were as creamy and tasty as any other VFD I've made.
Another thing that spurred me on to try the replacement was when my first attempt at the Cookies & Cream VFD got all clumpy as it was churning in my ice cream maker. It was like semifrozen rice pudding. Ugh.
The only thing I'd done differently was using a refined coconut oil that is liquid at room temperature and was described on the label as "Coconut Cooking Oil"; it was the only nonvirgin coconut oil I could find at that time (at Whole Foods). The oil doesn't contain anything but coconut oil, so I suspect the manufacturer must use some process to prevent it from solidifying. Whatever that process is apparently makes the oil unsuitable for cooking up VFDs.
1 Oreos have an interesting history. They actually contained lard (pork fat) until 1993, and they weren’t certified kosher until 1997 or 1998, after the production ovens were blasted with blowtorches and the conveyer belts used to move the cookies through the ovens were all replaced. According to the Cornell Chronicle article linked at “kosher,” Nabisco was pressured to make Oreos kosher by ice cream manufacturers who wanted to use the cookies in their Cookies & Cream flavor.
2 The specific storage proteins, or prolamins, in oats that may cause digestive harm to PWCD are called avenins. As that linked article explains, avenins have regions that are particularly rich in two amino acids: prolamine and glutamine. (You may remember from a biology class in your past that amino acids are the basic building blocks of proteins.) Cereal grains that contain storage proteins with these prolamine- and glutamine-rich regions tend to be associated with the onset of celiac disease. The article explains the differences between the size and structure of these storage proteins in oats versus those in wheat, barley, and rye, which are always harmful for PWCD to consume. (Just because they're interesting words to me, I'll list the avenin equivalents for other cereal grains: gliadin in wheat, hordein in barley, secalin in rye, zein in corn, kafirin in sorghum, and orzein in rice.) Gliadin and glutenin, another storage protein found in wheat that is not categorized as a prolamin, are the main components of gluten—and the ones that cause problems for PWCD. Because barley and rye contain neither gliadin nor glutenin, they don't really contain gluten. But those two grains' storage proteins are similar enough to gluten that they cause the same reaction in PWCD, and for simplicity's sake, we've been told to think of them as gluten-containing grains. The storage proteins in corn, sorghum, and rice are dissimilar enough from gluten that those grains are absolutely safe for PWCD so long as they haven't been contaminated with a problem grain. And to circle back to my main point—and the point of the study I linked to at "oat varieties"—the storage proteins in oats may or may not be safe for PWCD, depending on the variety of oat.
3I went to the Vegan Block Party with my friend Gerry. The number of vendors was overwhelming. I didn't try a frozen dessert while I was there, mostly because we didn't find the FD maker I was expecting to be there until we were ready to leave. (We had overlooked the outer ring of vendors that backed onto the highly visible ones in the area you entered after having your ticket scanned.) We ordered our dinner at Empress Eats, which had a good-sized but not offputtingly long line and whose menu was appealing. My coconut curry chick'n, with sweet potatoes and over rice, was delicious. Gerry got a dish inspired by short ribs with pineapple. It was outstanding and beautifully presented in a hollowed-out half pineapple.