My folks make homemade ice cream in a churn, you know, rock salt, churn thingie with milk eggs etc and a paddle in the interior of, hand crank thingie on the outside, wooden contraption that it all fits in?
So I’m living in NYC, buying large enough quantities of ice to do homemade ice cream is ludicrously expensive (and we haven’t the space for a freezer sufficient to freeze our own)… which would not be a problem, I have no quarrel with Haagen Dazs and etc, but…
WHERE THE HECK ARE THE COMMERCIAL BANANA ICE CREAMS ??
The closest I’ve found are Funky Monkey (a B&J flavor), Banana Split (HD flavor), and Bananas Foster (forget which brand). None of them are “very banana”, and the gf whose favorite ice cream flavor in this world is banana, is not pleased with any of.
Just want Banana. Not banans-and. Just Banana. Banana Ice Cream. Why is this hard to find?
I like banana ice cream too but I have yet to come across it in the stores. Oddly enough, one of the things that come closest are the various kinds of banana-chocolate ice cream bars. I know it’s not 100% banana-flavored but when I was a kid, I always thought the chocolate and the banana complimented each other nicely.
I guess until Ben & Jerry’s or HD puts out a pure banana ice cream, you’ll have to buy pints of it from one of your local ice cream parlors.
A few years ago, I had some “banana” ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery. I put banana in quotation marks because it tasted more like unflavored ice cream.
I’m guessing it probably was real banana. Maybe the reason why you don’t see any pure banana ice creams in the stores is because using only bananas to flavor the ice cream makes it come out too bland and tasteless. As a result, ice cream producers have to turn to artificial banana flavor or blend it with something like strawberry or vanilla to make it palatable.
You could use one of these Donvier Ice Cream Makers to make your own…no ice or rock salt needed…and I’ve bought them for way less than the Amazon price. In fact, I bought one for $5 at Goodwill…brand new! just freeze it and crank it…oh, great…now I want to make banana ice cream…sigh.
I see a lot of kinds of OTHER frozen treats made with banana. Like Banana sorbet, Banana Ice Milk, but not ice cream
Perhaps it’s more popular as a sorbet so they don’t bother using it in ice cream
Or perhaps since the banana itself is used in such ice cream dishes as a banana spilt they think of the banana as an ADDITION TO rather than a FLAVOUR OF.
Thank you so much, kittenblue!!! I have a Donvier and I lost the instruction manual with the recipes. THought I was never going to taste French Chocolate Silk again, then saw a copy on the page you posted. My tastebuds are in your debt.
Ben & Jerry’s book on making ice cream said that the key to making banana ice cream was you had to let the bananas get really ripe - all brown and spotty - before using them.
As another point bananas (available in US stores) aren’t that flavor “intense” and they would need to be homogeneously blended with the ice cream. If you have enough bananas to have a decent flavoring level it’s likely it would negatively effect the structural integrity of the ice cream re the ability to be “creamy” and freeze properly.
oh, no…I have a sack of frozen bananas in the basement freezer…and heavy cream…I’m lost, I’m afraid…oh, wait…the Donvier isn’t in the freezer this week…It’ll have to wait a day or two…
You might want to look around your locale for smaller dairies they sometimes make their own. There’s one by us that does different seasonal including banana, cantoloupe (I haven’t had the guts to try it), egg nog, and the perennial favorite Pumpkin. In fact thier pumpkin is so popular people will wait outside for a midnight sale the first say it’s available. I just mosey in a few days later to get mine.
I have made this recipe several times and it is *very *good. The only thing is that it makes a lot more than stated, so I have to make a half recipe so that it fits in my ice cream maker (Cuisinart).