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The texture's a little funny- a bit more like a frozen mousse than anything else, and the melt feels a little thicker to the touch than the regular stuff- but if any of y'all are in need of an ice cream recipe that does not involve dairy OR coconut OR banana OR avocado OR egg, I have tested a pretty good chocolate ice cream recipe that uses a stand mixer with a whisk attachment instead of an ice cream machine. There's xanthan gum involved as a thickener, but the base ingredient is aquafaba, the liquid in a can of chick peas/other beans.

I'm not vegan or otherwise philosophically/religiously restricted in diet. Several of my sister's kids have allergies of one sort or another; I've been looking for alternatives for some of the things they can't eat. This was a stab at something closer to regular ice cream texture than the stuff the no-dairy nibling currently gets.

No Dairy No Egg No Soy No Nut No Coconut No Banana No Avocado Ice Cream Recipe

For those of y'all who have multiple or particular food allergies, or who are avoiding one or more categories of ice cream ingredient for religious or philosophical reasons, or who have health issues of the non-allergy kind towards the usual ice cream ingredients and their substitutes, I’d like to present the following recipe which I have tested and found pretty good, especially when served with pie.

The recipe is within striking distance of vegan-okay. One of the ingredients is xanthan gum. Xanthan gum is a bacterial by-product of certain types of fermentation. Some companies use whey as the base for theirs, however. There are also some companies that involve chicken eggs in the production process. I used Bob’s Red Mill; theirs is certified kosher and vegan. If you have celiac, it may be a problem since they use wheat glucose to grow their xanthan gum. I can’t vouch for other substitutes at this time although I plan on trying guar gum next time I get the chance.

THAT BEING SAID.

Ingredients:
7 oz. bittersweet/dark chocolate, by weight, not volume. I used Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips. In this case I preferred chips to chopped chocolate in bar form because chips generally contain a certain amount of lecithin, which is an emulsifier that makes for a somewhat smoother texture. However, the chips contain milk fat and soy lecithin, so if you're avoiding either, get your chocolate from a different source.
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
1.25 cups of aquafaba. This turns out to be a little bit less than the amount of liquid in two fifteen-ounce cans of Whole Foods 365 brand No Salt Added chick peas. Not sure how Progresso or other brands stack up, but they’ll often have salt and/or some kind of calcium additive. I used the Whole Foods brand because there was no salt involved and no other additives on the cans.
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
½ teaspoon xanthan gum. Please note that xanthan gum usually comes in fairly large bags that will set you back a bit in terms of $. If you’re planning on making this and you don’t already have xanthan gum in the house, you may want to look into whether you know anyone who needs or makes their own gluten-free baked goods, because that’s the primary use home cooks have for the stuff and is probably the easiest way to use it up.

Procedure:

1. Melt the chocolate and let it cool slightly. I have no patience for double boilers, so I put my chips in a Pyrex measuring cup and microwaved them, stirring every thirty seconds until they melted completely.

2. I sincerely hope you have a stand mixer or whisk attachments for an electric egg beater, because this next step is NOT fun to do by hand. Put the whisk attachment on the Mixer. Pour the aquafaba into the mixer bowl and add the cream of tartar. Beat the aquafaba until it’s quadrupled in volume. I set my KitchenAid to about 6; it took a little more than five minutes. Higher speeds are okay too, if need be. I am told doing this by hand requires fifteen solid minutes of beating time. Hence the mixer.

3. With the stand mixer running, add the xanthan gum. Continue to beat for 30 seconds.

4. With the stand mixer still running, add both the sugars and beat until the mixture is firm and glossy. This took me about two minutes.

5. Turn off the mixer and take out the bowl. Very gently and carefully, use a rubber spatula to fold in the melted chocolate until the whole thing is an even brown color. I say fold rather than stir because you want to keep as much of the beaten air in there as possible; this is how you get the ice-cream-like texture without a churning machine and large amounts of saturated fat.

6. Carefully transfer the mixture to a container with a tight lid. If you don’t have a container that fits the results closely, cover the surface of the mix with plastic wrap; this is to minimize ice crystal formation.

7. Freeze overnight.

The result worked pretty well with apple pie. It scooped pretty well, too, although I had it on the counter for several minutes before scooping it just to be on the safe side. I'm led to understand that aquafaba can be persnickety for some people in the beating phase, but I don't know how much of that is down to using one brand of bean versus another.