Coconut Ice Cream

Pam and I have long enjoyed coconut ice cream at Thai restaurants. Sprinkle a few salty peanuts on top, and you've got an amazing dessert. We saw some for sale in a local Asian market the other day - something like $4.69 a quart. More than we care to pay!

So we dug out our old ice cream maker - unused for over 6 years at least - and tried an experiment. We substituted canned coconut milk (89 cents for 14 ounces) for the half-and-half in the "Philadelphia" no-cook ice cream recipe. Turned out great.

If you're in the mood to give it a whirl, and you've got or can get an ice cream freezer, here's the recipe:

1 quart canned coconut milk
3/4 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt

Mix all ingredients together and stir until smooth. Pour into freezer and freeze per instructions.

Some notes:

If you can find cans labelled "coconut cream," the contents seem to have a stronger coconut flavor.

We used turbinado, a minimally-processed sugar. Highly recommended. It's coarser than regular table sugar, so it takes more stirring to make the mixture smooth before freezing, but it will get there.

We tripled the recipe (served it to company!), which just filled our freezer to the "fill" line.

Try it and let me know what you think!