Tofu Ice-Cream

• 150g tofu
• 1/2 cup sugar or something else sweet (whatever you like best)
• a pinch of salt
• fruit, vanilla or something else for a special flavour/aroma

Milk Ice-Cream

Replace the tofu with:

• 1/4 l rice milk, oat milk or dairy milk, or even cream
• 2 egg yolks

or vegan:

• 2 tbsp soya lecithin powder
• for the rest, see tofu ice-cream

Tofu Ice-Cream

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix together using a whisk, hand-held blender or a food processor. When it has a uniform consistency, leave the bowl uncovered in a freezer or the freezer compartment of the refrigerator (maybe turning down the temperature as far as possible). Stir vigorously after one hour, and again after two hours and three hours. Then leave it undisturbed – after a total of 12 hours it should have frozen. (This means you can make the ice cream the evening before and leave it overnight.) Don’t forget to readjust the fridge temperature if you turned it down.

Since this recipe doesn’t contain as much fat as commercial ice-cream, it needs to be taken out of the freezer half an hour before serving, otherwise it is too hard to eat.

Milk Ice-Cream

If you make the ice-cream using non-dairy milks (such as rice, oat or soya milk) instead of tofu, you can mix in a couple of tablespoons of soya lecithin to make it nice and creamy.

If it doesn’t have to be vegan and you want to use cream or dairy milk, then you can use egg yolk as a binding agent. In this case, once it is all mixed together, heat this mixture gently. Don’t bring it to the boil (the egg yolk would curdle and separate from the milk). Just heat it to the point where it is too hot to put your hand in – at this temperature the egg yolk binds nicely with the liquid (since dairy milk contains fat).

Whatever ingredients you are using, the key principle is the same. Stir the mixture vigorously and regularly at the beginning, otherwise you end up eating ice crystals instead of ice cream.

The basic ice cream mixture can easily be flavoured in a natural way with fruit puree or vanilla (see side panel). Even powdered green tea tastes great in ice cream. However, the tea does have its own somewhat bitter taste and you’ll need to be careful how much you use, and add some extra sweetener as well. The more often you make ice cream, the more fun you can have trying out new flavours and aromas.

A delicious and particularly beautiful suggestion:

Ice-Cream Oranges

Cut off the top quarter of the oranges, scoop out the fruit pulp and put the hollowed out oranges to one side. Add the pulp to the basic ice cream mixture and proceed as per the recipe. When you have stirred the cold mixture after three hours in the freezer, spoon it into the hollow oranges and then put these back into the freezer.


In the Rampenplan kitchen we often make ice-cream without using a lot of energy or a freezer – we utilise the refrigeration effect that arises as by-product of our cooking system. The burners suck large quantities of propane gas at high speed out of the gas bottles, which get very cold. Any water on them freezes instantly and we often marvel at the natural ice sculptures which form between the bottles. And this space is also a perfect place to keep a bowl of ice-cream mixture, which we stir from time to time when we walk past …

Home-made ice cream needs a long refrigeration time before it is ready, so you need to start early!



If you want an alternative to raw cane sugar, try sweetening using: concentrated apple or pear juice, guava concentrate, maple syrup, sugar beet syrup or honey. Each of these will lend a different taste to the ice cream.

To make home-made vanilla sugar: Cut open vanilla pods, put in a jar, cover with sugar and seal tightly. After a week the sugar tastes of vanilla. If you don’t have the time for this, you can buy dried vanilla – it’s a powder, black and not very cheap.


As recently as 100 years ago, ice for refrigeration was still brought down from the mountains or ‘harvested’ in winter. Every town had deep ice cellars to store these natural ice blocks and to achieve really cold temperatures, the ice was mixed with saltpetre.