Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

By Inger Mar 25, 2025 Desserts & Snacks 8 Comments

Creamy and fruity, this homemade strawberry ice cream is easy and tasty with no cooking. Celebrate spring!

Strawberries are a favorite harbinger of spring. And as we cast off the cloak of winter, why not enjoy them in ice cream. It’s fruity, refreshing and fun—doesn’t that say Welcome Spring!

But there is one real challenge in making great homemade strawberry ice cream. It needs a high percentage of berries to achieve real berry flavor, but frozen berries can turn hard and icy when frozen.

But this recipe has a few tricks to address this. Even better, it’s easy!

Yes, I make ice cream a lot, so one of my goals is to develop recipes that don’t take a lot of effort. This means that I don’t use egg-based formulas which require cooking, then cooling, before freezing. Instead, just blend and freeze! How nice is that!

Why You’ll Love This!

Delicious. With creaminess and fruity strawberry flavor, this is a tasty and special treat.

Easy. You more or less blend up the ingredients, then pour into your ice cream freezer. No cooking or pre-cooling! (I do recommend chilling in the freezer overnight though I don’t always do that).

Healthier. Want to use organic berries, or reduce the fat or sugar slightly? Instructions included.

What You’ll Need

Ingredients

Strawberries. This provides the strawberry flavor and color.
Sugar. This helps sweeten the ice cream. It has also been successfully tested using Allulose sweetener for a reduced sugar version.
Cointreau or vodka. This helps improve consistency and reduce iciness. I think you can probably omit if needed, but I haven’t tested this.
Lyle’s Golden Syrup. This improves consistency and reduces iciness and can be ordered off Amazon. in theory you should be able to use light Karo syrup, but I haven’t tested this (and Golden Syrup is sooo tasty).
2% milk, heavy cream. These provide the body and creaminess.
Nonfat dry milk. This improves the consistency of the ice cream and helps sub for the lack of eggs. You can get it at most grocery stores.
Salt. Enhances flavor.
Guar gum. This improves the texture of the ice cream and gives it the slight “chew” that commercial ice creams have. I haven’t tested this specific ice cream without it. But in other recipes, the texture became lighter like gelato and is still good (just slightly different).

Special Tools

You’ll need an ice cream freezer for this.

Step by Step Overview

Remove a couple berries, chop them into whatever size pieces you want in your ice cream (smaller is probably better since big pieces may get quite hard) and mix with 1 Tablespoon sugar and the Cointreau or vodka. Set aside.

Mix the dry ingredients: guar gum (if using), the remaining sugar, nonfat dry milk and salt. Set aside

In a high speed blender, process the milk, cream, Golden Syrup, remaining strawberries (those not mixed with sugar and Cointreau) until the strawberries are well broken up.

Add the dry ingredients and blend until well mixed.

Stir in the reserved strawberry sugar mixture.

Freeze according to your freezer’s directions. When done transfer ice cream to your freezer to firm up overnight (after snitching a few tastes).

Tips & FAQs

I have been experimenting a lot with homemade ice cream and one of the interesting things I’ve learned is that some surprising flavors need a lot more sugar than others. My first attempt at Strawberry Ice Cream was sweet and full of strawberry flavor, but tasted flat until I added more sugar. My peppermint is fine with about half the sugar—go figure.

Can I use lower fat dairy? The recipe I settled on has half reduced fat milk, and half cream. But I’ll sometimes make my ice cream with all half and half, which results in a lower fat mix (since half and half is 12% fat and heavy cream is 36%). The results are still good but definitely less creamy. If you’re watching your fat or calories, I’d give this a try. For best flavor and consistency, to with the cream.

For a (slightly) reduced sugar version, this has been successfully tested using Allulose sweetener instead of sugar (though the Golden Syrup was still used to minimize iciness).

Wednesday #SpringSweetsWeek Recipes

Blueberry Blondies from Cindy’s Recipes and Writings
Caramel Twix Dessert Dip Recipe from Crazy For Couponing
Carrot Cake Shortbread Cookies from A Kitchen Hoor’s Adventures
Easy Tangerine Cake from Hezzi-D’s Recipe Box
Heart Fruit Skewers from For the Love of Food
Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream from Art of Natural Living
Lemon Greek Yogurt Bread from Jolene’s Recipe Journal
Lemon Lush Bars (redo) from The Spiffy Cookie
Nutella Stuffed Crescent Rolls from A Day in the Life on the Farm
Sheet Pan Pancakes from Cheese Curd In Paradise