Homemade delicious banana ice cream

Banana ice cream is Vietnamese people’s favorite dessert in the summer. Banana ice cream is often sold at small coffee shops in the parks or at small household stores in Ho Chi Minh city and many big cities in Vietnam. The majority are banana ice cream put in a plastic bag to easily take it away. When you travel to Vietnam for the first time, maybe this dessert would be strange to you. Squeezed fresh banana with roasted peanuts, some sliced jack-fruit pieces, cut white coconut meat, coconut milk are put in a plastic bag. It tastes really delicious. With the same ingredients, families often like to make banana ice cream in a plastic box instead of a plastic bag. When eating, banana ice cream is cut in some pieces that they want. This dessert is so easy to make, and it does not require much time to prepare and cook. Furthermore, bananas and coconuts are very cheap in tropical country like Vietnam. Today, I want to recommend a recipe of homemade banana ice cream put in a plastic box.

Ingredients

• 8 Thick banana (Chuoi Su, chuoi Xiem, chuoi Huong)
• 1 cup yogurt (100 gram)
• 300ml fresh milk
• 300 ml coconut milk or canned coconut milk
• 200 ml condensed milk (5 tablespoons or or 200g)
• 150 gr dry peanuts or roasted peanuts
• Scraped coconut white kernel
• Any kind of fruits: sliced jackfruits, sliced avocados… (optional)
  

  Ingredients of banana ice cream

Tools

• 2 plastic boxes or glass containers, a large bowl

Instructions

Step 1: Peel bananas, then cut bananas into 2 pieces vertically or slice it crosswise into small round 1 cm -thick pieces as you want.

Slice bananas in some pieces

Slice coconut kernels, avocados, bananas

Step 2: Roast dry groundnuts on a hot saucepan, stir them constantly to avoid them getting burnt. Roast peanuts until you can smell their flavour intensified and the peanut skins change into dark red or you can try to eat a peanut. If the peanut is crispy and not soft, it is roasted well.

Peanuts before being roasted

Peanuts after being roasted

Next, put roasted peanuts in a newspaper and wrap them in 5-10 minutes in order that peanuts are crispy and have a buttery taste. After that, strip peanut kernels of their red skins. Then spread shelled roasted peanuts into a plastic bag and break them into small pieces by a pestle or some hard tools.

Wrap roasted peanuts by a newspaper

Shelled peanuts after stripping peanut kernels of their red skins.

Step 3: In a large bowl, mix yogurt, coconut milk, fresh milk, and condensed milk, then stir them until they melt well.

Step 4: In a plastic box or glass container, spread sliced bananas at the bottom of a plastic box or a glass container. Next, spread scraped coconuts and any fruits if you want to try other fruit combinations. Here, I combine bananas with avocados because it is an avocado season. After finishing the first layer, pour slowly the mixture over bananas. Shake the box slightly so that the mixture can soak into bananas.

Then, do the same for the following layers of bananas until the last layer of bananas is about 0.5 -1 centimetre apart from the top of the plastic box. Remember to put roasted peanuts on the top layer of bananas.

Pour the mixture over bananas, coconut kernel, avocados

Step 5: Close the lid of the plastic box and put this box the fridge for 5- 6 hours to freeze it. Then you can take it out to eat.

Banana ice cream after freezing for 6 hours

Step 6: After 6 hours, let banana ice cream outside, next dip the box of banana ice cream in a basin of water for 2 minutes until the ice cream detaches from the plastic box, then easily take it out and gently cut it in many pieces you like. Besides, you can garnish this banana ice cream on a plate with more roasted peanuts and grated coconuts.

Cut freezed banana ice cream

Grated coconuts to garnish banana ice cream

Recipe notes

Choose bananas:

Thick banana (called Chuoi Su, chuoi Xiem, chuoi Huong in Vietnam) is very suitable to make banana ice cream because this type of banana is thick, not long. It tastes light sweet, owning a unique odour. You can choose other types of bananas according to your favourite.

You should not choose barely ripe bananas or too unripe or overripe or too soft to ensure delicious banana ice cream.

How to differentiate naturally ripe bananas from bananas ripen by chemical

Naturally ripe bananas are a bunch of ripe bananas which have uneven colors (such as it includes ripe bananas, green ones and unripe ones). Besides, they are getting black or dark pink spots.

Naturally ripe bananas

Bananas ripen by chemical have evenly ripe bananas with dark yellow skins.

Naturally ripe bananas are surely ripe from their stem and their skin. If their stem is green but banana fruit is evenly yellow ripe, then these bananas are soaked by chemical.

Try eating: for naturally ripe bananas, it would taste the scent and naturally sweet, even tender. For bananas ripen by chemical, they taste bitter, a bit hard, a bit sour.

Roasted peanuts

I often buy dry peanuts to make roasted peanuts at home instead of buy roasted peanuts at the markets since sometimes roasted peanuts at the supermarkets are old and it does not taste the delicious flavour. The way to make roasted peanuts crispy is guided above.

Coconut milk

 If you cannot find fresh coconut milk, you can use canned coconut milk at the supermarket. In Ho Chi Minh city, it is very easily to buy fresh coconut milk at any small markets. The seller can make it directly from old mature coconut by a machine of squeezing coconut milk. It is also cheap too. Of course, fresh coconut milk tastes a delicious odour and meaty.

Machine of squeezing coconut milk

You can adjust a quantity of peanuts, scraped coconut kernels according to your taste, but should not use too much because these ingredients not only make the food visually attractive, but also create buttery and greasy taste and it decide the quality of ice cream.

Banana ice cream

Banana ice cream is a dessert that is easy to make at home and also not expensive to buy ingredients at all. So, you can use your free time to make your own banana ice cream with other fruit combinations according to your taste.