I was recently thinking about ways to make a refreshing dessert a little healthier. I’ve had berries and cream before–where you just eat your berries with cream poured on. No sugar, yummy.

So I was thinking. Why can’t I just make ice cream with no sugar? I can add fruit to sweeten, but there’s nothing sour or bitter in there. It doesn’t need to be sweetened.

So I bought an ice cream maker (Kitchenaid attachment) and it was a mess! I should have tried out the new ice cream maker with normal ice cream first, but oh well. With this kind of ic maker, you make the ice cream and freeze it and freeze the bowl as well. When they’re both frozen, you mix it in the bowl to make ice cream. The mix was frozen solid and wouldn’t go in the bowl. I melted the mix and put it in the bowl and it still froze too solid.

Does the sugar keep it from becoming solid? Is there some other (healthy) thing that can keep it ice-cream texture? No unhealthy fake sugars like Splenda, please.
Thanks everyone for your help. I didn’t have enough space in the previous question to tell exactly how my ice-cream-making experiment went.

Here’s how my ice cream maker is supposed to work: You freeze the bowl, which is really thick and has some liquid inside that stays cold–likely is similar to the ice and salt in an old-fashioned ice cream maker (that’s the kind I’m used to–this was my first time using this new one).

You need to make the ice cream mix and put it in the freezer for at least 8 hours. Then you pull out the frozen bowl and the frozen ice cream and mix it to make ice cream.

As I said, I should have just followed directions the first time using the new method so I’d know what it’s supposed to do. Anyway, I took the ice cream mix out of the freezer and it was frozen rock solid. No way to pour it into the bowl.

So, I left the frozen ice cream in the fridge and refroze the bowl. When the ice cream was about halfway unfrozen, I tried again.
(continued)
What happened was the the sides, where it touched the sides of the frozen bowl, quickly froze ice solid and it couldn’t fix anymore. That didn’t work!

So, I cleaned and refroze the ice cream bowl and put the ice cream mix back in the fridge. When the "ice cream" was thoroughly melted, I added half cup of sugar (half what the recipe recommended), pulled the bowl out of the freezer, and tried again. This time it worked! The inside got creamy like ice cream should and the sides didn’t freeze rock solid to the sides of the bowl.

So… there’s been a bit of disagreement over what’s up with my ice cream, but given my experience, I’d definitely say the sugar was an anti-freeze. If anyone has any additional comments based on my experience, I’d welcome them!