Vegan Caramel for Ice Cream Swirls and Toppings

The internet contains plenty of vegan caramel recipes, often based on dates or nut butters. Some of them are quite good, but I’ve never been totally satisfied with them.

My requirements are:

• No cooking, if possible. Although I love to cook, I think a vegan caramel sauce/swirl should be quick and easy to put together. Part of the point (at least for me) is not having to fiddle with hot sugar on the stove.
• Rich and creamy. Many vegan caramel recipes are based on dates, which make a wonderful starting point, but not a single-ingredient solution. Dates by themselves lack the richness and creaminess that caramel gets from cream and butter.
• Complex flavors. Caramel gets flavor from cooked sugar plus cream and butter. Again, dates make a great base, but I want some of those deeper, more complex flavors of caramel.
• Won’t freeze solid in ice cream. No one wants a hard, crunchy caramel swirl in the middle of their ice cream.
• Less refined sugar. As long as it still tastes great, it might as well be healthier (kinda the point of this whole blog, actually).

A couple of surprising ingredients

Devising a vegan caramel recipe that checks all these boxes is a tall order, but I’ve come up with a recipe I’m satisfied with. It includes a couple of wild-card ingredients that I haven’t seen in other recipes. The first is olive oil, which steps in to replace the fat in caramel and balance the sweet dates with a bright, slightly bitter contrast. Cooking sugar for traditional caramel also creates a little bitterness, so it’s welcome here. Other unsaturated oils will also work fine (like avocado or walnut), but don’t use coconut oil because it will freeze too hard.

The second wild-card ingredient is nutritional yeast. It often pops up in vegan recipes to add a savory/umami or cheesy flavor, but I can’t remember seeing it in a dessert recipe before. Here, in a small quantity, it helps replace the taste of the cream and butter that traditional caramel would have.

How to use your caramel

The recipe below makes a soft paste that’s ready to be used as an ice cream swirl. The recipe makes about 1 1/2 cups, and I like to use about 1/2 a cup in a batch of ice cream, so this will make about 3 batches. Of course, you can use it for many other things, like topping other desserts, spreading on toast like jam, or snacking on spoonfuls straight out of the jar. It disappears rapidly and mysteriously from my fridge, but it will stay good in there for a couple of weeks, maybe longer.

To create an ice cream with a caramel swirl, churn your ice cream as you normally would. Then scoop about half of the ice cream into your storage container. Place blobs of caramel on top of the ice cream. Scoop the rest of the ice cream on top. Then drag a knife through the ice cream in a swirly pattern to distribute the pockets of caramel throughout the ice cream. See the pictures below, or check out my recipe for Bay and Thyme Ice Cream with Blackberry Swirl for more detailed instructions and pictures.

To quickly modify the paste to become a sauce, just add more of the “runny” ingredients until you get the consistency you want. Add them in the same proportions as in the original recipe. Start with adding 4 teaspoons milk/water, 2 teaspoons olive oil, and 1 teaspoon maple syrup. Repeat as needed. I also recommend heating the caramel slightly for a sauce or topping.

This vegan caramel is quick and easy in a food processor, so grab your spatula and let’s do this!

Vegan Caramel for Ice Cream Swirls and Toppings

Makes ~ 1 1/2 cups

Recipe Category: Dairy Free Egg Free Lactose Free No Cook Soy Free Swirls/Toppings/Mix-ins Vegan

Ingredients

Servings

• 2 cups Medjool dates, pitted and roughly chopped (~300 g or ~18 dates)
• 1/2 cup non-dairy milk of your choice (I used unsweetened almond milk. Water also works.)
• 1/4 cup olive oil (50 g)
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• 1 1/2 teaspoon nutritional yeast
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon Kosher salt

Instructions

1. COMBINE

   Remove the pits from the dates, if needed. Add all ingredients to a food processor. 

    

   

2. BLEND

   Blend all the ingredients until smooth, scraping down the sides of the food processor a few times, as needed.

    

   

3. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

   From here, you can:

   • Use the caramel as an ice cream swirl. I like to use about 1/2 cup of swirl for a 1-quart ice cream recipe. (All my recipes make approximately 1 quart.)
   • Thin out the paste to turn it into a sauce/topping. Do this by adding non-dairy milk/water, olive oil, and maple syrup in the same proportions as the recipe, until the sauce has the consistency you want. Start by adding 4 teaspoons milk/water, 2 teaspoons olive oil, and 1 teaspoon maple syrup. Repeat as needed.
   • Eat it straight off a spoon, or any other way you can think of.

   Any leftovers will keep in the fridge for quite a while -- a couple of weeks at least. Mine have always disappeared by then...