Dole Whip is a thing. For me it’s a Disney thing, but you can definitely find it outside the parks (we can get it at our local frozen yogurt “top your own” place). You can also order the powdered mix if you have an ice cream maker, but it seems to be on perpetual back order.
Obviously, that means I needed to try and make my own. Online, there are three recipes floating around. One is the “official” Disney one that includes ice cream, but that seems wrong since traditionally this is a vegan dessert, so no dairy should be included. The other two involve frozen fruit, coconut milk, and a few other ingredients. I tested those two (sorry, no pictures, you’ll just have to channel Figment and use your imagination)
The first recipe called for 1 cup of frozen pineapple, a frozen banana, a tablespoon of powdered sugar, a half cup of coconut milk, and a teaspoon of lime juice. I put it all in a food processor and vrooooom…it tasted a lot like banana, so I just added in more pineapple. The banana flavor never really yielded to the pineapple, but the texture was nice and creamy.
The second recipe called for 3 cups of pineapple, 1 cup pineapple juice, 1 cup coconut milk, and 1 cup of mango. For this one, I actually swapped out more pineapple instead of the mango. I had learned my lesson from the banana incident. This definitely hit all those pineapple notes, but lacked the creaminess of Dole Whip (that was kind of present in the first recipe).
Clearly, regular Dole Whip is processed in a way to get some creaminess that is tough to do at home without unexpected modifiers (like banana, or the ice cream in the recipe I didn’t bother to try). Also, if you try and store your homemade Dole Whip, it hardens up real bad.
I think the key is to do some research on the ingredients in the powder stuff. I’m sure there are some additives we can pick out that modify texture in specific ways to get this creaminess, and I bet there are some molecular gastronomists that have figured out a way to mimic that at home. I am also going to try and melt some of my leftovers down and then pour the juice into an ice cream maker to see if that helps. I will have to revisit these tests.
