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Making delicious, creamy, homemade raw milk ice cream doesn’t have to be difficult. It all starts with raw milk and cream, pastured egg yolks, a splash of vanilla and sweetened with maple syrup or honey. It whips up so quickly and your whole family will love it!

Fresh Raw Milk

Perhaps you have joined the homesteaders of the world and jumped onto the family milk cow bandwagon and have a jersey cow of your own. Or perhaps you are like us and are hoping for a dairy cow one day, but for now, we are happy to support our local farm a couple miles down the road and get fresh raw milk from their herd share program for much less money than we could keep a cow for here on our small homestead. 

One day we would love to have a dairy cow and be inundated with copious amounts of fresh raw cream, whole milk and be able to make all of our own dairy products. We currently get 2 gallons a week from our local farm and I am able to keep us pretty well stocked on chocolate milk for the kids, raw milk yogurt and fresh mozzarella cheese for pizza night each week. That is enough for us right now, but I’d love to have extra milk one day to share with others and branch out into more cheesemaking and other healthy foods from the fresh cream and whole milk a dairy cow provides.

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Raw Milk Ice Cream

Ice cream is the quintessential summer treat, isn’t it? But around here, we love ice cream all year long. My favorite way to eat ice cream is probably over top of a rich and fudgey brownie. But paired with warm, fresh from the oven apple pie is a close second.

I think my love for ice cream comes from my childhood. My Dad usually kept a half gallon of grocery store ice cream in our freezer – mint chocolate chip, always.

With the help of an inexpensive ice cream machine or just a glass dish, you can make this raw dairy ice cream recipe super quick, right at home. Also, if you don’t have raw milk or don’t want to use it, this recipe works just fine with whole milk and cream from the grocery store.

Let’s Talk Ingredients

With just 5 simple ingredients, you can make this delicious raw milk ice cream recipe at home. Like all good recipes, this one starts with good, high quality ingredients – just the good stuff.

Ice Cream Base:

Whole Raw Milk(or any fresh milk) – Below I will explain a little more about why our family drinks and uses raw milk to make our dairy products at home, if you are interested. 

Raw Cream(or heavy cream, or heavy whipping cream) – have you ever taste raw cream? Oh it is heavenly. 

Raw Honey or Maple Syrup – raw honey is my go-to for this recipe just because I keep a lot of it on hand for bread making, but maple syrup is just as good. 

Vanilla extract or vanilla bean – you can use either one in this recipe. Vanilla beans give a much richer flavor, but let’s be real, most of us just keep vanilla extract on hand, not vanilla beans, ha!

Raw eggs – or egg yolks, to be specific – we have chickens and I am very comfortable consuming their eggs raw, as I know what they eat and what their living conditions are like. Of course there is always a risk and you should do your research and decide for yourself. If you are worried about store-bought eggs, ask around and see if you can find a neighbor with chickens or a local farm that you can pick up eggs from. Most towns have a resource for pastured eggs if you look hard enough. 

Tools You May Need

Ice-Cream Maker – this is not an essential, but it sure makes ice cream making a lot easier. This one is my favorite. It is inexpensive and gets the job done quickly. This model has a bowl that needs to be frozen before you can use it to make raw ice cream(or any ice cream). So I just keep the bowl in my freezer at all times that way whenever the cravings hit, we can have ice cream within just a couple hours or even sooner if you like a soft-serve style ice cream!

Blender – I recommend blending the mixture together just to make sure everything is well incorporated. But you could also just mix with a whisk or handheld mixer like this one.

Glass Dish – if you are not going to use the ice cream maker method, then you can use a glass dish to make the raw milk ice cream. After you blend the ingredients together, pour them into a glass baking dish. Place the dish in your freezer and set a timer on your phone for 30 minutes. Every 30 minutes pull the dish out and scrape the outer edges(that are more frozen) to the inner part of the dish. Repeat this until the ice cream is the consistency you are looking for.

How To Make Raw Milk Ice Cream Recipe

This part couldn’t be easier, add all the ingredients listed in the base recipe into a blender and blend until everything is well combined. Or whisk the ingredients until well combined if not using a blender.

If you are using the ice-cream machine, add the raw ice cream into the ice cream machine and follow the directions for your ice cream maker. For mine, that means churning for 20 minutes and then freezing in an airtight container until the desired consistency is reached. If you like soft serve style ice cream, then you can eat the ice cream right out of the machine.

Like I mentioned above, if you don’t have an ice cream maker to make the raw milk ice cream, then you can use the manual method that I mentioned where you freeze the mixture and stir the ice cream in a glass dish every 30 minutes until set.

No boiling, no fuss. Super easy!

Why Raw Milk?

This topic can be a little heated, but I’ll touch on it briefly in case you are wondering why our family chooses to drink and use raw milk in our home.

Good Bacteria

The pasteurization process kills all the bacteria in the milk – both good and bad. There are good bacteria in raw milk that aids our body in digesting the proteins and nutrients in the milk. Clean and fresh raw milk has probiotics, cultures and enzymes in it to help our body use the nutrients within it and help our body digest the milk properly

A Nutrient Dense Food

I discovered raw milk when my twins were little. While I was nursing them, they reacted very poorly to dairy in my diet, so I was quite nervous to give them dairy products from the store when they started eating solids and were weaning.

I was surprised to learn about how raw milk is a healthy food, has many health benefits, is loaded with beneficial bacteria, vitamins, minerals and amino acids. Once I was educated on the benefits of raw milk, I knew we needed to try it.

“In many ways, raw milk is similar to breastmilk: both are completely natural, fresh, and unprocessed milks. They both contain a wide variety of essential nutrients, fats, proteins, anti-inflammatory and digestive enzymes, bioavailable vitamins, and minerals, all in a natural form which is most easily utilized by the body. In addition, raw milk facilitates production of lactase enzyme in the intestinal tract, allowing many people who are lactose intolerant to digest raw milk with no problems.” -rawmilkinstitue.org

In addition to the health benefits, many people with a dairy intolerance are able to tolerate raw milk because of the enzymes and probiotics that aid the body in digestion. Reminds me a lot of why we choose to consume whole wheat in its freshest form, click here if you want to learn about how I mill our wheat fresh for homemade breads, muffins and other treats.

Freshly Milled Bread Workshop

If you are interested in learning more about freshly milled flour and how I use it to make breads, cakes, cookies, muffins, pizzas, tortillas, bagels and MORE – check out my bread workshop here. 

Storing Raw Milk Ice Cream

Nothing fancy here, just store the ice cream in an air tight container in the freezer. 

Additions To Fold Into The Basic Raw Ice Cream Recipe

Chocolate Sauce

Caramel Sauce

Fruits(blueberries, peaches, strawberries)

Cookies

Jam

Nuts(pecan, peanuts etc.)

Toasted Coconut

Raw Milk Ice Cream Recipes Variations

There is no end to the variations you can make with this delicious, basic recipe. There are so many different flavors and things to add to the ice cream mixture and all of them are way better than store-bought ice cream! Try any of these homemade ice cream recipes and make sure to let us know which is your favorite!

Chocolate – try adding a half a cup of cocoa or cacao powder to your mixture. This will give a delicious and rich chocolate ice cream flavor. A great way to spice up this basic ice cream recipe.

Strawberry Ice Cream – add 1.5 cups of fresh(or frozen, thawed) strawberries with the rest of the ingredients. This makes a delicious recipe with so much strawberry flavor!

Cookies and Cream – add 1.5 cups of crushed cookies of your choice, such as chocolate chip cookies, chocolate sandwich cookies etc.

Chocolate Chip – 1.5 cups of chocolate chips makes a really nice addition to this raw ice cream recipe. You can use the tiny chocolate chips, chop the larger ones or just keep them as is. Just make sure you fold in the chocolate chips after you blend the other ingredients.

Banana Split – I wouldn’t recommend adding bananas to the ice cream base, but don’t forget the banana split option! You can use the vanilla ice cream recipe or the chocolate variation to make raw milk ice cream banana splits – right at home!

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream – add 1 tsp of mint extract before blending and then fold in 1 cup of chocolate chips.