As Good As Ice Cream, Healthier Than Frozen Yogurt

I could eat way too much of this. You don't know the meaning of life until you have tried this. Love ice cream but hate the guilt? I've got you. I'm making delicious gut-friendly kefir ice creams that are fully customizable, no ice cream maker needed, and no stovetop prep. Sure, you could make frozen yogurt that would also be maybe a little bit healthier than regular ice cream, but this method amps up the probiotics for a truly gut-loving treat. But wait, does freezing kill the probiotics? Stay tuned. I'll link some recipes for you below, but there's really no single way to make this. That's kind of the fun of it. All you need at the bare minimum is kefir and your favorite sweetener. Then you can customize it with whatever extras you like and even make it creamier too. So let's make a simple vanilla. This can be the base you work from if you want. I'm going to start with about two cups of plain whole milk kefir and then I'm going to go all natural with some raw honey, about a half cup. If you want to go with a lower glycemic index option such as allulose, go ahead and use a little bit more than you would with your honey because this is a little bit less sweet. So for a half cup, maybe use three-fourths cup of allulose. Then I'm going to throw in two teaspoons of vanilla extract. You could use vanilla bean here also. And then I'll go in with just a little pinch of salt to bring out the flavor. You really don't have to blend this one in a blender, but I like to just because it mixes the honey a little bit better. But if you want to be a little bit careful with damaging your probiotics, I have a video on that. Just make sure you don't do this forever and at too too high of a speed and you'll probably be fine. Now this goes into the freezer and should be stirred very well to break up the ice crystals as many times as you can think of until it freezes. And a lot of times if you're me, that's only once. So worst case scenario, your ice cream comes out a little bit icy. It's still going to taste really good. And of course, feel free to put any of this in an ice cream maker if you have one. Let's try this out and then we're going to make a few other varieties. Here's how it turns out. This is really good. Tastes like vanilla. It is a little bit icier than regular ice cream. I wanted to give you this simple option in case you really just want to go with the kefir and want to keep it nice and easy and as healthy as possible. But now let's beef it up a little bit after I eat some more. So that was the healthy version and will be good, but it might not taste exactly like ice cream. So if you want to make it even more creamy and decadent, swap out one of the cups of kefir with heavy cream or just keep it to the two cups of kefir and add a third cup of heavy cream up your sweetener a little bit. You can play around with it. So let's kind of do that with a strawberry kefir ice cream and this one is out of this world delicious. For this, I'm going to start with three cups of frozen strawberries, one cup of heavy cream. I'm going to use three-fourths cup of allulose this time, but again use whatever sweetener you like. I'm going to put in two teaspoons of vanilla extract again and a pinch of salt, maybe two pinches. And now just in case to make sure none of my microbes get damaged in the blender, so I can just blend this on super high, I'll wait and put my kefir in after this is blended. Okay, I'm gonna add about a cup of my plain whole milk kefir and then I'll blend a little bit more just to mix everything fully together. Let's make sure this turned out okay. That's insane. You will not be disappointed with this one. All right and this just also gets thrown into a jar and whoops left a strawberry chunk. Put in the freezer. I wanted to say refrigerator. Freezer. You're gonna again stir frequently as this freezes as many times as you can think of and you will 100% eat half of it before it's fully frozen. Trust me on that. Okay, moving on. Maybe. Completed version. Okay, we've made vanilla. We've made strawberry. So we must make. I'm gonna start with about two cups of plain whole milk kefir. That's probably about one cup and probably two. I'm gonna go ahead and add in a cup of heavy cream. Although again, you don't have to. You could keep this simple. And heavy cream by the way for those of you that don't live in the United States and are like what in the world is that? It's just something that has more fat in it than whole milk. So usually around 30 some percent. But just bringing in this extra fat content is gonna add to the creaminess of the final product. Let's see. I'm gonna throw in. I don't know. We'll go allulose again. Feel free to use honey, maple syrup, cane sugar. Whatever sugar you like. I'm gonna go in with one cup this time. I'm gonna add one teaspoon of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. And then of course we need something to make it chocolatey. I like to use cacao powder rather than cocoa powder because it's more nutrient dense. I'm using a fourth cup. Now I'll give this a light blend to mix everything together and make sure the allulose has dissolved. Let's see how this tastes. Tastes as good as any chocolate ice cream I've ever had. Here's the completed chocolate minus a bite. Excellent. Okay so I promised that I would let you know whether or not you're wasting all of these great kefir probiotics by freezing them and potentially killing them in your ice cream. So here's the deal. This is one of the most solid studies on the topic and it builds on earlier research with consistent findings. And the bottom line is this. Freezing kefir does lower probiotic counts but luckily many still survive. Especially in traditional kefir as compared to commercial kefir. So something that you make at your house that has a lot more strains is going to do better when frozen than something that you commercially bought. So while frozen storage caused a decline kefir still remained a meaningful source of probiotics even after being frozen. And counts do happen to drop more with more time frozen. So just eat your ice cream quickly and I'm sure that won't be a problem for most of us and then you're gonna have a higher survival rate anyway. So that's it. A creamy probiotic packed kefir ice cream you can make at home with no equipment. And it will have about a hundred less ingredients than ice cream you'll likely pick up from the grocery store. Think of all the flavor combinations you can make. Peach honey, that's one of my favorites. Let me know what you try and how yours turns out. And remember to eat real food. I'll see you next time.