Vegan ice creams\, anyone?

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Vegan ice creams, anyone?

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This duo is selling vegan ice creams that they make by hand on their rooftop at home

Ramya Unnikrishnan and Pranav Murali look through the menu with a hint of despair: no vegan options to be found. Again. Their hunt to find vegan friendly food options in the city has been a long one: in it, probably, lies the origin of the duo’s idea to make Chennai’s first vegan ice creams. With The Vegan Bowl, selling through its Instagram handle, the duo serves upto eight flavours of vegan ice cream.

It was towards the end of 2018 that Ramya and Pranav started experimenting with smoothie flavours on Pranav’s rooftop. They still do so, having chosen to make ice creams from January 2019 through this cloud kitchen.

The ice creams, made of coconut milk, sit on vegan cakes packed in glass jars, much akin to dessert jars. While plant milk is a vegan alternative to milk and cream for ice creams, the duo use oil and warm water instead of butter and milk to make the cake base. The flavours are usually infused by fruit rushes, to ensure uniformity in taste.

Their ice creams can be safely labelled handcrafted — “Since all the equipment to machine-make ice creams are expensive, we have to stick to manpower,” explains Ramya. Half an hour of hand churning and ladle churning goes into making the contents of each 190 ml jar. But before that, comes the effort of coconut milk extraction: the two do everything themselves, right from breaking open the coconuts to blending them and straining out the coconut milk that forms the base of the ice creams. . Not surprisingly, the ice cream has a subtle coconut after taste to it. Praveen even compares it to coconut burfi, since its consistency is thicker and the flavour more intense than dairy-based ice cream.

They must be doing something right, considering the fact that over 100 jars get sold every week. Ramya says “The vegan community is quite strong in Chennai. In the past month, the demand for our ice creams has risen so much that we can’t just make them after receiving orders. We have to stock up on all flavours.”

Vegan cakes and delivery app partnerships are the immediate next steps for The Vegan Bowl. “Once the tie-up (with a delivery app) is finalised, we might have to bring more people on board because the orders will be quick,” says Ramya. The two also dream ofstarting a vegan restaurant in Chennai some day.

For more details about The Vegan Bowl and to place orders, contact them on Instagram at @theveganbowlchennai.

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