Banana Ice Cream

The original post for this recipe from Use Real Butter (which I found via Pinterest) titled it “single ingredient ice cream”, but really it’s banana ice cream with various flavorings.  So, it’s not reaaaally a single ingredient recipe (which she did admit in her post).

We don’t buy ice cream anymore because the good stuff is full of sugar and fat and we’d rather keep that at a minimum.  Considering my other baking experiments, it’s probably a good thing that we don’t have ice cream on hand to add to the internal chaos that comes with deliciously unhealthy foods.  I was originally very skeptical about this recipe because it sounded too good to be true, but I just decided to go for it.

Ingredients (is seems silly to list these at this point):

• 4 bananas, just slightly overripe (brown spots good, completely black not so good)
• 2 tbsp creamy peanut butter (optional – thus 2 ingredient ice cream)
• 2 tsp cocoa powder (optional – thus 2 or 3 ingredient ice cream depending on peanut butter)

Directions:

Note: Don’t freeze the banana whole.  That could seriously mess up your food processor.

1. Peel the bananas and slice them up into 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick disks.
2. Place the banana slices in the freezer for about an hour or until they are frozen solid.  Overnight works nicely.
3. Put the frozen slices in a food processor and process the crap out of us.
4. First they will start to resemble gravel, but keep going because it will soon turn into a frozen mush.
5. When the bananas look like whipped ice cream, add your preferred flavor!
6. Makes about pint.

This turned out great!  I used just one banana (I wanted chocolate and my husband wanted peanut butter) and it turned out to be a perfect single-serving!  I was slightly worried after the “gravel” stage, because my food processor started to strain and got really hot.  I did have to stop a couple of times to smoosh the banana down so the blades could continue their work.  It very suddenly turned from gravel to mush.  It was like a step function (sorry, I’m an engineer; that’s engineer speak for “one second it was gravel, the next it was mush”).  It was cool to watch.  Then I added an absurd amount of chocolate cocoa powder.  YUM.

I really liked that I did not need to add sugar.  I had a chocolate banana.  Delicious.  My husband really liked his peanut butter version (no sugar added as well) and we didn’t feel like we had just eaten ice cream.  It was excellent.  I will probably make these tonight.  Again.

 [UPDATE Apr.04.13 – You can freeze the chopped up banana for up to a week (probably longer).  You can also freeze the ice cream once it’s made.  I left it in the freezer for over a week, and after letting it thaw for about 30 minutes, it had a texture very similar to ice cream, better than just eating it right away.  See this Update Post for details!].