I haven't tried it raw, but buttermilk icecream is delicious and lately I have noticed a trend towards things like buttermilk-fried chickenburgers and similar foods, I've been meaning to try one.
I don't think the buttermilk ice cream is made from teh same buttermilk that the OP is referring to. The milk leftover from the churning of butter is a kind of tangy skim milk and it can't be used to make ice cream because all of the fat has been removed to make the butter.
The buttermilk you buy in the store is basically fermented milk. It has a totally different flavor and texture. It is also delicious and you should totally make fried chickenburgers with it. You should also make biscuits, pancakes, cornbread, etc with it (assuming you eat those things) because buttermilk has an amazing flavor that's really unlike anything else.
My wife and I made strawberry ice cream from raw milk and raw cream just last week. It's easily available in California, just like unpasteurized cheeses.
Fun fact: Ice-cream is the food that most closely resembles breast-milk, nutritionally. So how bad can it be? ;-)
(I guess the answer depends mostly on what you think about saturated fat and sugar. If you believe both of those are fine, ice-cream is A-OK. I eat it a lot and seem to do alright.)
(At least, ice-cream in the traditional sense -- milk, sugar, maybe eggs, whatever flavors. Sadly many of the ice-creams you'll see on the shelves these days have all kinds of weird fillers and stuff; whether those are healthy or not is a whole 'nother question.)
> The creamy mouthfeel is one of the reasons ice cream is so much better than "frozen dairy desert" or lots of frozen yogurts.
The reason those have a weird mouthfeel isn't because they don't have fat, but because they're made from powder.
> does the creami only make things a soft-serve texture?
The texture is somewhere between soft serve and traditional ice cream right after you spin it, but if you refreeze the pint and then microwave it for a few seconds it's closer to traditional icecream.
But why would someone who's avoided meat for 35 years be interested in something that pretends to be meat?
I've not had milk-based ice cream for more than 5 years. There's a great variety of non-dairy frozen treats and I've eaten most of them. But I would not be a good person to ask which would be most palatable to someone who loved real ice cream -- I can't even remember what that tastes like.
An addendum to your last point: people want to eat REAL ice cream.
The only time I've heard of a non-dairy ice cream actually being called good by anyone but a health-freak was coconut based (incidentally, not coconut flavoured).
Huh, I'm skeptical, but if a low-fat ice cream substitute really can be just as creamy as real ice cream then I guess I'm OK with people liking it. I'd love to try it one day, but I have such a good ice cream machine already and no need for a creami that I'll have to wait until someone I know gets one.
My local Amish community has an annual fundraising auction day thing for their school. Dunno what the ice cream they make would be branded, but THAT STUFF.
There's no substitute for real, unsanitary, dairy. There's just good reasons not to do a lot of it, like crack.
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