Yoghurt Blueberry ice cream (low fat, low sugar)

Making healthy ice cream can be difficult. By reducing fat and sugar, many end up rock-hard in the freezer and several alternative sweeteners do badly in ice creams.

Making healthy ice cream can be difficult. By reducing fat and sugar, many end up rock-hard in the freezer and several alternative sweeteners do badly in ice creams.

But there is hope!  Here is a very nice blueberry-flavoured yoghurt ice cream, low in both fat and sugar!

The base – Yoghurt ice cream without sugar

Yoghurt ice cream can differ – personally, I find the ones based on yoghurt and cream to be among the tastiest. However, today the challenge is to reduce the fat (and the sugar) so I opted for a middle way: by using Turkish (or Greek) yoghurt with a fat content of about 10 % and an equal amount of milk, the overall fat will still be significantly lower but not so low as to create too much structural problems or a too “thin” mouthfeel.

To sweeten the base, I opted for my favourite alternative sweetener – birch sugar, also known as xylitol. Xylitol is, in my view, perfect for ice cream making – while most other alternative sweeteners do little or nothing to maintain a softer ice cream structure (resulting in the ice cream freezing rock-hard), xylitol actually does this even slightly better than ordinary sugar. The drawback? If you have a sensitive stomach or eat too much of it, you could get a tummy ache. And dogs can’t eat the ice cream either (no showstopper in my book, as there are many other things – like chocolate – that dogs can’t eat either).

Since I will add some (sugar-sweetened) blueberry jam to the base, my yoghurt ice cream won’t be totally sugar free. However, it is of course also perfectly possible to use the base with any other (sugar-free) flavours!

If you have no xylitol and/or care little for the “sugar free aspect”, feel free to simply use 120 ml ordinary sugar instead: the rest of the recipe stays the same:-) .

With so relatively little fat, it would seem important to make sure that the base is properly emulsified. While this could be achieved by adding a couple of egg yolks, I opted for a couple of tablespoons of soy lecithin: a vegetable alternative emulsifier well suited for ice cream-making without eggs. Since lecithin does not require any heating to work (and, unlike eggs, doesn’t require any pasteurisation), there is no need to make this ice cream on the stove: all we need to do is mix the cold ingredients together and whisk well!

How much lecithin should be used? Many who advise on egg replacements suggest to go by 1 tablespoon = 1 egg.

However, for ice cream emulsion-purposes – considering the amount of lecithin in a normal egg – it would seem that 1 teaspoon = 2 eggs (or close to 2 gram) would be quite adequate (or even more than adequate) for our recipe. Lecithin is not considered a dangerous substance so if you stray a bit and slightly overdose, there should typically be no other problems than the spending of slightly more powder than strictly necessary.

For the blueberries, I opted for good-quality blueberry jam! This is, in my view, a very good way of adding fruit to ice creams (as long as you like the flavour of the jam of course)!