Basic Ice Cream

Basic ice cream combines enjoyment with health. Alkaline ice gives a light and fresh feeling and therefore fits into every diet, every detox, and every alkaline week. Basic ice cream is free of cheap fillers, acid-forming ingredients, synthetic flavorings, and all the other artificial things you can safely do without but found in almost any regular ice cream. Basic ice cream is easy to make yourself – and only from the best basic ingredients. Try it and enjoy!

Ice cream made from basic ingredients

A summer without ice cream is simply unimaginable. A summer without the conventional acid-forming ice, on the other hand, is very easy to imagine. Because ice cream is also available in basic quality. So if you want to eat alkaline or alkaline-excessive and if you prefer vital substances to harmful substances, then you don’t have to do without your beloved ice cream.

On the contrary: basic ice cream will quickly make you forget the dubious pleasures of industrially produced ice cream.

Conventional Ice Cream – The ingredient list

You have probably avoided looking at the list of ingredients for your favorite ice cream until now. What you read here is not particularly appetizing. Let’s take the basic recipe for a popular ice cream (chocolate flavor) from the supermarket:

Skimmed milk, glucose-fructose syrup, whey products, sugar, vegetable fat, cream, low-fat cocoa, cocoa mass, emulsifier (mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, E442, E476), cocoa butter, stabilizers, butterfat, flavoring, coloring

Dairy products in ice cream

We have already provided extensive information about dairy products (see further texts at the end of the article), so a delicious dessert cannot really be enjoyable if it consists largely of precisely these, i.e. skimmed milk and a whey product. Furthermore, “whey product” does not mean fresh whey, of course, but whey that has been industrially modified beyond recognition and then pulverized.

Sugar and sugar syrup in the ice

Ice cream is hardly feasible without sweeteners. Since “normal” table sugar – a well-known very inexpensive product – is usually too expensive for ice cream manufacturers, the much cheaper glucose-fructose syrup is used instead. And not too little of that: just a small popsicle should contain an amount of sugar or syrup that corresponds to about eight sugar cubes.

However, sugar makes many people addicted and makes them prefer sweet and carbohydrate-rich snacks to healthy meals rich in vital substances. Thus, sugar is one of the most significant risk factors for modern civilization diseases and therefore to a certain extent clouds the enjoyment of ice cream in the summer.

Fat in the ice

Ice cream also contains plenty of fat. But not cream, as one might think, and as is customary in traditional ice cream recipes. There is no butter either. Instead, “Butterfat”. But only a little of it, since vegetable fat is simply much cheaper. Unfortunately, the consumer does not find out much more, as the list of ingredients simply says “vegetable fat”.

However, as is well known, there are many vegetable fats and they also come in very different – ​​healthy and unhealthy – qualities. However, the details of the vegetable fat used seem to be part of the ice cream maker’s secret.

Food Additives in Ice Cream

Since ice cream is a finished product – unless you make it yourself – more or less artificial food additives are of course also necessary in its production. Whether stabilizers, thickeners, flavors, or colorings. They are all represented in ice cream.

The emulsifiers include the mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471). Their origin is always uncertain to the consumer. They are mostly made from soybean oil and – since there is almost only GM soy on the world market – we can assume that the rather rare and expensive GM-free organic soybeans are not exactly used for the production of E471.

However, E471 can also be made from animal raw materials. Here, too, a lot remains hidden and should – if it were up to the food industry – not be of too much interest to the consumer.

E476 is another emulsifier that is often used in ice cream. It is called PGPR for polyglycerol polyricinoleate. It is brand new to the additives market and has not been approved in the EU for long. However, since it can alter the permeability of the intestinal mucosa and cause excessive enlargement of the liver and kidneys (as shown in this study: Assessment of the Carcinogenic Potential of Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate (PGPR) in Rats and Mice), it may only be mixed into certain foods, e.g. B. in chocolate ice cream. E476 can also be produced by genetic engineering.

The situation is very similar to E442, which is also an emulsifier. It may only be used in chocolate products and only in limited quantities, as otherwise, it can lead to over-acidification and irritation in the digestive system.

When it comes to flavors, you usually read the addition “natural”. But you probably already know that natural flavors can only be called “natural” because they were made from some natural substance. The most popular example is the “natural” strawberry flavor which tastes like strawberry but is derived from molds grown on sawdust in the flavor factory. And since sawdust and mold are extremely natural, the aroma in question can be described as a natural aroma.

That’s why it’s often the case that strawberry ice cream has never seen a strawberry. The situation is similar with many other types of fruit ice cream or with vanilla ice cream, which can easily be made into vanilla ice cream without a vanilla bean but with synthetic vanillin. All of this is not least a question of price. Flavors are dirt cheap – in contrast to fresh berries or even real vanilla.

With the above example recipe, however, one would have been really lucky. Because there are ice cream ingredient lists that start with water, followed by vegetable oil and sugar – which means that these three ingredients are the most common in terms of quantity. Only then comes the skimmed milk, which is immediately followed by sugar in the form of glucose syrup and inverted sugar (a mixture of equal parts glucose and fructose).

Regular ice cream – fat, sugar, and lots of air

So when we think we’re eating ice cream, we’re actually eating sweetened and flavored unspecified vegetable fat combined with skim milk. Emulsifiers and stabilizers are essential so that fat and fat-free milk can be mixed at all and the ice cream stays airy.

Speaking of air: did you know that with conventional ice cream you buy up to 47 percent air? For example, your packaging says that it contains 2500 milliliters of ice. However, when you weigh the ice cream at home, you find that you only bought 1,300 grams. So almost half of the volume of ice is air.

This is of course good for the manufacturer, as it saves a lot of ingredients and money. He tells you that it’s good for you too because all the air makes the ice cream particularly creamy. And he’s not even that wrong about that. Because if you prefer to use inferior ingredients (water, vegetable fat, sugar syrup), then you really need an extra portion of air to get them creamy.

Also, the ice cream maker is right when they say this is good for YOU. But that has little to do with the creaminess, but rather with the fact that the higher the air content in the ice cream, the less you have to subject your body to the inferior and industrially highly processed cheap ingredients. Air is a lot healthier there.

Traditional ice cream has to be cheap

Of course, ice cream could also be made creamy with cream instead of air. In traditional ice cream recipes, you will therefore also find 30-40 percent cream (and at most 20 percent air). You might still find such ice cream in health food stores. In conventional ice cream, however, there is often not even a trace of real cream. And if it does, this rare event is immediately advertised on the packaging (“Refined with cream”).

“Refined” really hits the spot perfectly. Because you shouldn’t expect more than 2 to a maximum of 8 percent cream in this case, just as much as you need for refinement. The rest still consists of the cheapest and most heavily processed mass-produced goods. Real cream is simply too expensive for ice cream makers. Of course, the cream is also a dairy product, which can be considered to be rather neutral in terms of the acid-base balance, but is not really necessary for a healthy alkaline ice cream – as you will see later.

If the ice cream is then equipped with special features such as pastries, crispies, biscuits, or the like, it naturally also supplies wheat starch, egg white, and other sugar, emulsifier, and stabilizer variations. And even hazelnut ice cream has by no means become hazelnut ice cream because ground hazelnuts were added to the recipe.

The food industry does not use ground hazelnuts. These are hardly durable and technically difficult to handle. The hazelnut aroma is much handier there. But hazelnut pulp is also used. That sounds pretty natural, but unfortunately, it doesn’t just consist of hazelnuts, but mostly sugar. Soy lecithin is used as an emulsifier – again from genetically modified soy, of course.

Ice cream – no thanks?

So ice cream is really not something that fits into a healthy and alkaline diet. It’s also not the least bit fun to watch your children gorge themselves on the industrial mish-mash. But wait, now we’re exaggerating. Finally, the enjoyment value must also be considered here. After all, it is so important for our mental well-being to be able to lick an ice cream now and then.

If one were to ban ice cream – the pedagogically trained nutrition experts exclaim at this point – the soul would suffer immeasurably, and ultimately one knows that bans make no sense, on the contrary, they lead to missing and craving what is forbidden all the more.

However, the question here is by no means “Ice cream – yes or no?”, but rather “WHICH ice cream do I want to eat?” Industrially produced ice cream made from questionable cheap ingredients that are overly acidic, makes you fat, and in reality, tastes horribly artificial? Or would you prefer a basic ice cream rich in vital substances that you can quickly make yourself with a powerful mixer, that consists exclusively of fresh, vegan, and high-quality ingredients and – even if you eat it every day – even helps you lose weight?

Basic ice cream

Basic ice cream consists of just a few basic ingredients: Frozen fruit, freshly squeezed orange juice or almond milk, dates, white almond butter, and – if you wish – real vanilla. All of these ingredients are metabolized as alkaline, do not burden the organism in any way, and provide bioavailable vital substances and minerals. The result is a fresh, fruity, and easily digestible ice cream that is not only fun for our souls, but also for our bodies.

Below we present the recipe for a basic pineapple ice cream. Of course, you can also experiment with other fruits, e.g. B. with strawberries, bananas, blueberries, apricots, etc.

Basic pineapple ice cream

Ingredients:

• 200 ml freshly squeezed orange juice or homemade almond milk
• 8 pitted dates (more if you like)
• 2 tbsp white almond butter
• 400 g frozen pineapple pieces

Preparation:

The night before, peel a pineapple, remove the stalk in the middle, and cut the pineapple lengthwise into thin strips and then into small pieces. Freeze the pineapple chunks.

The next day, put the freshly squeezed orange juice or almond milk in a high-performance blender (e.g. Vitamix) together with the dates, almond butter, and possibly the vanilla. Blend until you get a uniform cream.