Dairy free huckleberry ice cream is a delicious way to use fresh huckleberries in an allergy friendly summer treat! Our recipe is also egg free, but it’s still smooth and creamy. If you don’t have access to Western huckleberries, you can use wild blueberries in this ice cream.
If you’ve spent time around the Rocky Mountains, you know that huckleberry treats are a local specialty in certain areas of the mountain west, and huckleberries are even the official Idaho state fruit.
I’ve been wanting to post some huckleberry recipes on our website for a while, but they don’t grow in our part of Wyoming, so I have to hit up the summer farmer’s markets for fresh huckleberries when we travel through Montana or Idaho.
I finally got my hands on some more fresh huckleberries again a few weeks ago at a farmer’s market in Coeur d’Alene, and I have several recipes in the works, the first one is our dairy free and egg free huckleberry ice cream! This recipe is so yummy and very smooth and creamy even without the eggs and dairy. You’ll love this one if you enjoy a good fruit ice cream.
If you want to give this a try but don’t have access to fresh huckleberries, we include some options later in this post!
Why we love this recipe
Our huckleberry ice cream is a sweet and fruity treat that is perfect for hot summer days, and even without eggs, it’s still smooth and creamy thanks to the cornstarch we use (there’s more info on why we used that below).
This ice cream takes a few extra steps to make since we make a huckleberry sauce first then add the rest of our ice cream ingredients, but it’s still not complicated to make, and you can make it and serve it within just an hour or 2.
What are huckleberries?
Western or mountain huckleberries are small, purple berries that grow on shrubs typically in higher altitudes with cool, moist climates in areas that get snow cover in the winter. They typically grow in western Wyoming and Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.
What we consider huckleberries in the mountain west (genus Vaccinium) are a bit different from true Eastern huckleberries (genus Gaylussacia). They all share a family (Ericaceae), but different genera. Mountain/western huckleberries are more closely related to blueberries (also genus Vaccinium), and are considered to be a native blueberry.
They are about the size and shape of a wild blueberry, with similar tiny seeds and a fruity and somewhat floral berry taste.
Wild huckleberries aren’t always easy to come by if you don’t know where to find them and don’t live in the areas where you can pick them, and when people do find them, they often keep their picking spots secret. So they can be pretty expensive to buy at a farmer’s market.
It cost me $40 for 2 pint bags of fresh huckleberries a the farmer’s market in Idaho, which is expensive, but very similar to what I’ve paid in farmer’s markets in Helena. So be prepared to pay about $20 a pint for fresh huckleberries. Expensive, but a fun summer treat if you are a fan of huckleberries.
If you want to give this recipe a try but don’t have access to fresh huckleberries, you can use wild blueberries instead. Wild blueberries are small and flavorful and would make a good sub here since they are related to mountain/western huckleberries. Most wild blueberries are frozen, so you can thaw, drain, and then measure out the wild blueberries for this recipe. OR you can use pre-made huckleberry syrup, jam, or sauce in this recipe.
How to make dairy free huckleberry ice cream
Here is a step-by-step walkthrough for this recipe. This is just an overview of the steps, the full recipe card is at the end of the post.
- Wash and pick through your huckleberries, removing any stems and bad berries. Measure out 1 ½ cups of huckleberries and add them to a 2-quart saucepan.
- Add the sugar, water, and fresh lemon juice to the pan with the huckleberries and heat over medium heat, stirring regularly, until it begins to simmer.
- Once it begins to simmer, lower the heat to medium-low and simmer for 8 minutes, stirring regularly.
- Add 2 cups of the room temperature coconut milk to the huckleberry sauce in the pan, putting the remaining 1/3 cup of coconut milk in a small bowl for our cornstarch slurry.
- Whisk the cornstarch into the coconut milk in the small bowl and whisk this into the pan with the coconut milk/huckleberry mix and continue to heat and whisk for several minutes as the mixture begins to thicken slightly. This will thicken but it won’t be as thick as our homemade puddings since there is less cornstarch.
- Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract.
- From here, you can either put this in the fridge to completely cool for several hours before churning, or you can use an ice bath to quickly cool the huckleberry ice cream mixture for churning. I used the ice bath method for ours and it took about 30 minutes to chill for churning.
- For the faster cooling of an ice bath: pick 2 bowls, one medium-sized bowl that fits into a larger bowl. In the large bowl, fill it about 1/3 full of ice and add some cold water. Set the smaller bowl inside the larger bowl with the ice, and add the ice cream mixture into the smaller bowl and stir regularly for even cooling. It helps if the smaller bowl is metal since it transfers the cool temps to the ice cream mix faster. You can add more ice as needed to the larger bowl as well if it melts.
- Stir the ice cream mix regularly in the ice bath to cool it down. It will thicken a bit more as it cools.
- Once it’s chilled enough (it just needs to feel cool to the touch), add it to your running ice cream machine and run it for about 25 to 30 minutes. I have the Cuisinart Gelataria, and I used the ice cream setting for 25 minutes, which resulted in a great, soft-set ice cream consistency.
- Serve the ice cream immediately if you like, or add it to a covered container and freeze to scoop later. You can serve this with chocolate sauce on top or our homemade huckleberry sauce (I’ll be adding a recipe soon for that!).
- You can top this with chocolate sauce, huckleberry sauce (I’ll be posting a recipe for that soon), or crumbled lemon sandwich cookies.
Check out our homemade and dairy free huckleberry milkshake recipe made with our homemade huckleberry sauce and dairy free vanilla ice cream!
Why is this ice cream more red in color?
If you’re familiar with commercial huckleberry products like candies and shakes, you’ll notice that they are often a bluish-purple color, which is different than the reddish-purple of our ice cream.
Some commercial huckleberry products are a different shade of purple thanks to food dyes in some of them (not all of them). Homemade huckleberry sauces and syrups are more red than blue-purple, so the color of our ice cream looks different than you might expect.
How much ice cream does this recipe make?
This recipe makes about 1 quart of ice cream mixture, but since ice cream expands, it makes more than 1 quart of ice cream. I made the mistake of measuring the ice cream mix but not measuring out the churned ice cream to see how much it expanded (oops), but this was climbing up my 2-quart machine as it churned and getting pretty close to the top, so I think it ended up making between 1 and 1½ quarts of ice cream once it was done churning after 25 minutes.
You’ll need to make sure that your ice cream maker can handle this amount of expanded ice cream, and reduce the size of the recipe to fit a smaller machine if needed.
Why is there cornstarch in this ice cream recipe?
We just purchased a new ice cream machine (a Cuisinart machine with gelato settings), and I noticed that some of the gelato recipes in the ice cream maker book used cornstarch and pectin. I had considered using cornstarch in my ice cream recipes before, but wasn’t sure if it’d actually work until I started looking through the ice cream maker book and noticed it.
I did some digging online and I found out that Sicilian gelato uses cornstarch in place of eggs and heavy cream. This is a great idea for people who can’t have eggs! So I decided to give that a try to see if it makes our dairy free and egg free ice cream smoother and creamier.
We loved the result in our huckleberry ice cream! This ice cream is smoother, thicker, and creamier since it has fewer ice crystals in it, which is a game changer for dairy free ice cream, especially ice cream with a lot of fruit, fruit syrup, or fruit juices in it, which easily form ice crystals.
This also doesn’t melt as fast either. Some of our other dairy free ice creams are either frozen solid or melting too fast, and this has the right consistency and doesn’t melt super quickly.
If you can’t have corn, you can leave this out of the recipe (it won’t be as smooth or creamy), or you can try using tapioca starch or arrowroot starch instead.
Check out our chokecherry syrup recipe!
Dairy Free Huckleberry Ice Cream (Egg Free)
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups fresh picked through huckleberries*
- ¾ cup sugar
- 2 tablespoons water
- 2 teaspoons lemon juice
- 2 ⅓ cup coconut milk room temperature
- 1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons cornstarch make slurry with some of the coconut milk
- dash salt
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Equipment
Instructions
- Wash and pick through your huckleberries, removing any stems and bad berries. Measure out 1 ½ cups of huckleberries and add them to a 2-quart saucepan.
- Add the sugar, water, fresh lemon juice, and dash of salt to the saucepan with the huckleberries and heat over medium heat, stirring regularly, until it begins to simmer. We are essentially creating a huckleberry sauce before we add our coconut milk for the ice cream.
- Once it begins to simmer, lower the heat to medium-low and simmer for 8 minutes, stirring regularly.
- Add 2 cups of the room temperature coconut milk to the huckleberry sauce in the pan, putting the remaining 1/3 cup of coconut milk in a small bowl for our cornstarch slurry.
- Whisk the cornstarch into the coconut milk in the small bowl and whisk this into the pan with the coconut milk/huckleberry mix and continue to heat and whisk for several minutes as the mixture begins to thicken slightly. This will thicken but it won’t be as thick as our homemade puddings since there is less cornstarch.
- Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. You should have about 1 quart of huckleberry ice cream liquid.
- From here, you can either put this in the fridge to completely cool for several hours before churning, or you can use an ice bath to quickly cool the huckleberry ice cream mixture for churning. I used the ice bath method for ours and it took about 30 minutes to chill for churning.
- For the faster cooling of an ice bath: pick 2 bowls, one medium-sized bowl that fits into a larger bowl. In the large bowl, fill it about 1/3 full of ice and add some cold water. Set the smaller bowl inside the larger bowl with the ice, and add the ice cream mixture into the smaller bowl and stir regularly for even cooling. It helps if the smaller bowl is metal since it conducts the cool temps to the ice cream mix faster.
- Stir the ice cream mix regularly in the ice bath to cool it down. It will thicken a bit more as it cools.
- Once it’s chilled enough (it just needs to feel cool or cold to the touch), add it to your running ice cream machine (if using a freezer container type ice cream maker, turn on the machine first) and run the ice cream machine for about 25 to 30 minutes. I have the Cuisinart Gelataria and I used the ice cream setting for 25 minutes.
- Serve the ice cream immediately if you like, or add it to a covered container and freeze to scoop later. You can serve this with chocolate sauce on top or our homemade huckleberry sauce (I’ll be adding a recipe soon for that!).
- You can top this with chocolate sauce, huckleberry sauce (I'll be posting a recipe for that soon), or crumbled lemon sandwich cookies.
Notes
Nutrition
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Sarah Jane Parker is the founder, recipe creator, and photographer behind The Fit Cookie which she founded in 2011. Sarah is based in Wyoming and has been managing food allergies for herself and her 2 children for over 20 years. Sarah was also a certified personal trainer for 12 years, as well as a group fitness instructor, health coach, running coach, and fitness nutrition specialist.