Chai Oat Milk Ice Cream

I completely forgot about this post while I was removing from surgery. Just totally left my mind. I wrote this about mid to late March 2024. However, I think the ice cream was great so I am still posting it!

I would love to be out in the garden starting for this year, but I had surgery at the beginning of March. It’s really thrown me for a loop, so while I recover I have been puttering around inside the house.

Today’s project was turning a box of chai oat milk into ice cream. We bought a case of this oat milk last fall at Costco, and this is my recipe for the base I’ve been working on. I am trying to keep the ice crystals at bay for texture. It works pretty well.

Ingredients:

• 4 Cups Chai Oat Milk, or one full carton.
• 3/4 Cups Sugar
• 4 Egg Yolks
• 1/4 TSP Guar Gum
• 1/2 TSP Cinnamon
• 1/2 TSP Ground Ginger
• 1/4 TSP Black Pepper
• 1/4 TSP Cloves
• 1/4 TSP Cardamon

Directions:

1. Mix the guar gum into the sugar thoroughly.
2. Heat oat milk in a sauce pan.
3. When it’s warm, add the sugar and guar gum with an immersion blender to ensure it’s not going to clump on you.
4. Heat milk to hot, but not boiling.
5. Temper the milk into the eggs in a separate bowl by adding spoonfuls of hot milk into the eggs while whisking, then when the egg yolks are good and hot, add them slowly back into the saucepan with the rest of the milk while whisking it in. How to temper egg video if you need it.
6. Continue heating for 8 minutes, but don’t boil. Whisk regularly.
7. Strain the resulting mix into the bowl. You’ll want to strain out any random clumps and eggy bits or escaped guar gum.
8. Cool on ice until room temp, then put into the fridge until completely cold.
9. Use the ice cream maker of your choice.

Notes

I have been doing a lot of test recipes for ice cream ever since I got my Whynter Ice Cream maker. That’s not an affiliate link, I just liked it. I just wanted an ice cream maker that had its own compressor. It’s a $300 machine, but I was so fed up with store bought ice cream getting weird I threw down the cash on a serious ice cream maker. Plus, getting non dairy ice cream is expensive and never that good.

It’s as if all the corporations out there are hell bent on saving that last tenth of a cent on everything despite all the record profits they rake in from our consumption, so the ingredients are getting cheaper, and the taste is crappier. I never thought I would have nostalgia for junk food from the 70s and 80s, but here we are.

This ice cream maker has its own compressor so you don’t have to freeze anything. You just toss your ice cream mix into it, press go, and it goes. I never have room in my freezer, nor can I organize when I will make ice cream, so this saves me from having to pre-freeze a bowl. This one has a yogurt maker option, but I haven’t delved into yogurt making at this point in my life. It’s extravagant, but now that I live in a home I own, I can actually pay for things and expect to keep them long term, instead of however long I have that much space in my rental.

I tried this recipe without the extra spices first, but the cold dulls the chai flavor, which wasn’t that chai forward to begin with. I like a chai that bites back, so I added the spices in from my favorite chai recipe. I think I could have honestly doubled the amount, but it’s still quite good.

I have also been experimenting with stabilizers, and I have found without the guar gum, you get a very icy crystal texture to varying degrees. The eggs are also an ice cream stabilizer, but I find without them, you don’t get a rich ice cream texture and it feels thin. Together, it comes out pretty good. This has worked with milk, cream, and now oat milk as my base.