Lactose-Free Strawberry Ice Cream
Ripe strawberries cooked briefly with sugar, folded into a sweetened coconut base and churned or still-frozen. Genuinely lactose-free rather than a compromise, and it scoops straight from the freezer.
About this dish
Ice cream without dairy is older than the dairy kind: the sorbets that reached Italy from the Arab world were water, fruit and sugar. Coconut milk is the modern shortcut back to a scoopable texture, because what makes ice cream soft is fat holding the ice crystals apart, and full-fat coconut milk has as much of it as cream.
- Vegan
- Gluten-free
- Lactose-free
Ingredients
- 600gStrawberries
- 800mlFull-fat coconut milk
- 160gCaster sugar
- 2tbspLemon juice
- 1tspVanilla extract
- 1tspFine sea salt
Instructions
Hull and halve two-thirds of the strawberries. Cook them with a third of the sugar and the lemon juice over medium heat for 8–10 minutes, until collapsed and syrupy. Cool completely.
10 minTip: Cooking concentrates the fruit and drives off water, and water is what turns homemade ice cream into a block of ice. Raw purée tastes fresher but freezes far harder.
Warm the coconut milk with the remaining sugar and the salt, stirring just until the sugar dissolves. Do not let it boil.
8 minTip: Sugar is not only sweetness here — it lowers the freezing point, which is what keeps the finished ice cream soft enough to scoop.
Blend the cooled strawberry mixture into the coconut base with the vanilla. Chill the whole thing in the fridge until properly cold, at least 4 hours or overnight.
5 minTip: Churning a warm base makes coarse crystals. The mixture must be refrigerator-cold before it goes anywhere near the freezer.
Churn in an ice-cream maker until thick, or pour into a shallow tray and freeze, beating hard with a fork every 30 minutes for the first 2 hours.
240 minTip: The beating is doing by hand what a machine does continuously: breaking crystals as they form. Miss the early rounds and the texture is set against you.
Fold through the remaining strawberries, chopped, and freeze for a final hour. Move to the fridge 10 minutes before serving.
10 minTip: Fruit added at the end stays as distinct pieces rather than dissolving into the base — and the ten minutes in the fridge is what lets a scoop come away cleanly.