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Recipe: Hibiscus & Passion Fruit Ice Cream from “Great Scoops”
Hibiscus flowers (aka Jamaican sorrel or roselle hibiscus), when dried, make for a brilliant cranberry-coloured tea. When in bloom, at Christmastime, they’re brewed with ginger and rum for a favourite Caribbean punch.
This vegan ice cream recipe featured in Great Scoops: Recipes from a Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop by Marlene Haley and Amelia Ryan of The Merry Dairy with Anne DesBrisay celebrates the first warm days of spring. The Merry Dairy pair the tart, citrusy flowers with sweet passion fruit—both pulp and seeds. Look for dried hibiscus flowers in shops specializing in Caribbean foods or in the Asian aisles of supermarkets.
Hibiscus & Passion Fruit Ice Cream Recipe
Makes about 1 quart
Ingredients
2 (400 ml) cans coconut milk, chilled for 24 hours
1 (400 ml) can coconut milk, room temperature
1 1/2 cups (300 g) sugar
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
2 ripe passion fruits
1 cup (40 g) dried food-grade hibiscus flowers (see Tip)
Method
Prepare an ice bath.
Scoop out 1 1/2 cups (350 g) coconut cream from the chilled cans of coconut milk and reserve coconut water for another use. Whisk together coconut cream, coconut milk, sugar and salt in a medium-sized saucepan. Stir over medium-high heat for 5–7 minutes, until sugar is dissolved and no visible bits of coconut cream remain.
Meanwhile, cut passion fruits in half and scoop out the pulp and seeds. Add to the saucepan along with the hibiscus. Reduce heat to low and steep passion fruit and hibiscus for 20 minutes.
Remove from heat and strain through a fine-mesh sieve into the inner bowl of the prepared ice bath, pressing down on the passion fruit and hibiscus with a stiff rubber spatula to extract as much flavour as possible.
Cool the ice cream base in the ice bath until room temperature, stirring occasionally. Cover and chill in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, or overnight.
Once the base is chilled, you may notice a layer of solids on the top. Give it all a quick mix to incorporate before churning. Place storage container in the freezer to chill. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions until ice cream is thick and creamy and has increased in volume by about a third. The base is ready when (with the machine turned off) you can scoop a big spoon of it and watch the ice cream fall back into the bowl in thick trails.
Freshly churned ice cream can be enjoyed right away or, for a firmer scoop, stored in a chilled airtight container in the freezer for a further 2 hours. For optimal flavour and texture, homemade ice cream is best consumed within 2 weeks of being made.
Excerpted from Great Scoops: Recipes from a Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop by Marlene Haley and Amelia Ryan of The Merry Dairy with Anne DesBrisay. Photographs by Christian Lalonde. Copyright © 2022 by The Merry Dairy. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.