Two frozen bananas = ice cream? No sugar, no cream
Blend two frozen bananas and they turn smooth and cold like ice cream, about 210 kcal for a big bowl with almost no fat and no added sugar. It costs the price of two bananas, needs no cream, and cools you down on a hot Indian summer day.
On a hot day you want something cold and sweet. Ice cream sounds great, but a bowl carries cream and sugar. Try this instead: freeze bananas, then blend them. They turn thick and creamy like soft ice cream. People call it nice cream. It needs only bananas, no milk, no cream, no sugar. It is cheap, cooling, and easy to make at home.
Your nice cream bowl: two frozen bananas
Blend two medium frozen bananas and you get a big bowl of creamy nice cream. That bowl is about 210 kcal. It has almost no fat (less than 1 g) and about 29 g of sugar, but all of that sugar comes from the fruit itself. There is no added sugar and no cream at all.
Assumptions: 1 medium peeled banana weighs about 118 g. Raw banana is about 89 kcal per 100 g, so one banana is about 105 kcal (89 x 1.18). Two bananas (about 236 g) = about 210 kcal. Sugar in raw banana is about 12.2 g per 100 g, so two bananas carry about 29 g sugar, all natural from the fruit. Fat in raw banana is about 0.33 g per 100 g, so two bananas carry about 0.8 g fat.
Nice cream vs vanilla ice cream
Per 100 g, banana nice cream has less than half the calories of vanilla ice cream. The same big cooling bowl of nice cream (about 235 g, 210 kcal) gives you more than twice the food of a 2-scoop ice cream bowl (about 100 g, 207 kcal), for almost the same calories. Ice cream is dense because it is built from heavy cream (about 340 kcal per 100 g) and added sugar (about 386 kcal per 100 g). Nice cream is built from bananas alone.
Make it a one-banana bowl
Want a smaller sweet? Blend just one frozen banana instead of two. You still get the creamy cold treat, but half the size and half the calories. This is a great portion for kids or for a tiny after-dinner sweet.
Nice cream has no sugar added, so it is a sugar-free dessert.
mostly falseMostly false. There is no added sugar, that part is true. But a banana still has natural sugar. Raw banana carries about 12 g of sugar per 100 g, so a two-banana bowl has about 29 g of sugar from the fruit. That sugar comes with fibre and potassium, so it fills you up better than syrup. But it is not zero sugar, so do not treat it like water.
How to make it creamy, not icy
- Use ripe bananas with brown spots. They are sweeter and blend smoother than green ones.
- Peel and slice the bananas before freezing. Frozen whole bananas are hard on your blender.
- Freeze the slices for at least 4 hours, or overnight in a tiffin box.
- Blend in short pulses, and pause to scrape the sides. It takes a minute to go from crumbly to creamy.
- If the blender gets stuck, add a tiny splash of cold milk, just a spoon or two, to help it move.
- Top with a few chopped nuts or a pinch of cardamom, not chocolate syrup or honey, to keep the added sugar out.
The bottom line
Two frozen bananas and a blender give you a big cold bowl of nice cream for about 210 kcal, with almost no fat and no added sugar. Per gram it has less than half the calories of vanilla ice cream, because ice cream is built from heavy cream and added sugar and nice cream is built from fruit alone. It costs the price of two bananas and cools you down on a hot summer day. If you want a smaller sweet, use one banana for about 105 kcal.