Songs of yesterday

So, it's been over a year. It's been an eventful year that's somehow put me back in the position I was when I first started making ice cream: affected by a change in health status, and unsure how to make the kind of ice cream I want to make. 

First of all, this year. I was trying out YouTube, hence my absence from here, but that taught me that whilst I very much enjoy making ice cream, I don't enjoy being a content creator. Conversely, I'm good with the words, writing is how I share and how I process. It's also another year that I end/start with chest and breathing problems - it's basically a re-run of 2023/2024, which is when I started properly making ice cream in the first place, because I couldn't do the long walks with heavy camera equipment anymore following a severe chest infection. (For full background, I had dabbled before this point but having to change my primary hobby prompted the bulk of my ice cream making.) But this time it isn't the breathing problems that have prompted a change in how my hobbies are undertaken. This time it's lactose intolerance.

Truth be told, I was expecting this. I inherited a lot of my dad's digestive system, and he has lactose intolerance; more to the point, I inherited allium intolerance from him and one of the theories behind allium intolerance is a link to a lack of lactase (although exactly how eludes me, and with no research at all I suspect it may be a 'correlation is not causation' situation, ie both issues are signs of poor digestive health rather than one directly causes the other.) I suspect I've had it for a while, I've had other times I've wondered about it, but I've been covering it up because I'm actually largely plant-based in my diet so I just didn't encounter dairy. That is, until I was unwell and didn't have the energy to cook for myself and so I ate a lot of ready meals, some of which included dairy and you can guess the rest of the story from there. 

How does this impact ice cream? It's kind of in the name: cream. Which I can no longer have, or at least not without discomfort. And that's why I'm once again unsure of how to make the ice cream I want to make. Unlike my first explorations into ice cream, I at least know what I want to make now - it's all about good quality base ingredients, nothing else added, and recipes that highlight how they work. But how do you make ice cream without cream? 

There are a few routes I could take. The obvious is the lactose-free substitutions, where actual dairy products are treated with lactase enzyme so the lactose is already converted before it reaches your digestive system. Probably the most straightforward, it's basically a like for like substitution and I've already made some ice cream like this for my dad ... but it takes away from the 'nothing else added' aspect. (And let me once again reiterate that adding things like stabilisers and enzymes isn't bad, it's just my preference to avoid because I'm not an industrial ice cream maker and I don't believe home made ice cream needs it.) I haven't completely ruled it out, but I'd be surprised if I ended up going this route. I could focus on styles of frozen dessert that by the nature of them avoid dairy anyway - effectively, I could become a water ice/sorbet maker. There is interest here, and figuring out the more classic ice creams like chocolate and pistachio in sorbet form would be an interesting challenge. I could explore plant-based ice creams, so mostly vegan recipes (although not strictly: I have to avoid dairy but I can have eggs, when I first went plant-based I allowed ice cream as an exception and that's not changing.) It's something I've only touched on briefly and not particularly successfully, but with more effort I could see success here. 

What's exciting is I get to go back to my earlier days of ice cream education and exploration. Ice cream making had become procedural, I had grown comfortable and so devising a new flavour was just a case of picking the most appropriate base recipe. I wasn't experimenting anymore, and now I get to experiment again. And even more excitingly, I get to take you on the process with me. By the time I was writing this blog, I had already largely done these experiments, the closest I got was in the making of the sherbet. I can show you it all this time, from the first trials to narrowing down what works and what doesn't, and most importantly learning why that's the case so the next version builds on the ones before until I end up with the best dairy-free ice cream recipes that are unlike anything you can just buy.

The world of ice cream making is exciting once again for me and, nearly exactly two years after I first started it, here I go again.