Banana Dulce de Leche Ice Cream
I always keep frozen bananas in my freezer. In fact, I just picked up an entire basket of maybe 10 pounds of bananas for a dollar just yesterday and am right stocked up for whatever or whomever might require a vast quantity of bananas. I like to leave them in the peels, I don’t think it’s too much trouble to thaw them a minute to slice them off, but I know a lot of people peel them, freeze them individually and store them in resealable bags. To each their own.
The flesh of frozen bananas smooths out and gets very creamy, so even bananas alone can be pureed for a pretty satisfying and luxuriously ice cream-like consistency. Which is why I was a little disappointed in the texture of this ice cream flavor I tried to concoct because I overestimated the bananas ability to keep things creamy by themselves once everything had frozen. Freshly churned the texture was amazing though, and the taste just like what I’d wanted for a banana bread flavored ice cream.
I sweetened this with dulce de leche because it has a mellow caramelized flavor I figured would work better than trying to devise a brown sugar solution. Okay, for the sake of transparency, this was really more or less thrown together to satisfy a specific craving. But honestly, I think if this were more of a custard base, the texture of this would’ve been perfect and I’d have no complaints, so I’m posting it anyway. Ha ha!
- 3 cups whole milk
- 1 1/2 cups dulce de leche
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 ripe bananas, frozen
- (optional) 1/4 cup walnuts
- (optional) 1/4 cup chocolate chips
- Heat the milk with the dulce de leche in a pot until the dulce de leche has dissolved completely. Remove from the heat and stir in the salt, cinnamon and vanilla extract. Chill in the refrigerator until cool.
- Blend the chilled mixture with the frozen bananas and then churn in your ice cream maker until it reaches a soft serve consistency.
- Mix in walnuts and chocolate chips, if using, and continue to churn until it reaches a firm consistency. Eat immediately because you know you want to.