Magic ice cream

I have a dirty little secret.

Are you ready?

You can make creamy, delicious ice cream with one ingredient.

That’s right, one ingredient. And it’s healthy.

The secret behind the secret? Bananas.

I do not like ripe bananas; they freak me out. I only eat green bananas. To me, ripe bananas are only good for two things: smoothies or baked goods. But now I can add a third thing to that list.

There has been some buzz in the blog world about this one-ingredient ice cream, but to be honest, I was kind of skeptical. But I had two ripe bananas that clearly needed to be dealt with and this unseasonably warm weather we have been having recently made me a little ice cream hungry, so I decided to bite the bullet and give this little experiment a try.

And it really worked! Will it forever replace traditional ice cream for me? Probably not. But it is a great healthy alternative when you just have to have some ice cream, and is a perfect alternative for vegans or people with food allergies.

So! Let’s do this.

Slice up a couple of ripe bananas.

Toss them in the freezer for a couple of hours. Once they are frozen through, put them in your food processor.

Run your food processor until the bananas become smooth and creamy. Stop staring at the reflection of your blue power-on light.

At this point you can do a couple of things. If you like soft-serve ice cream, you can go ahead and eat it as-is. This would also be a good point to turn this into a two-ingredient ice cream by mixing in a couple of tablespoons of peanut or other nut butter or, if you need a chocolate fix, perhaps some Nutella. I drizzled some honey into mine and it was delicious.

If you prefer hard ice cream (as I do), transfer it to an air-tight container and freeze until hard. Scoop and enjoy while bawling your eyes out during the Biggest Loser (I know I’m not the only one…).

I used two bananas and it made about two cups of ice cream.