A Thai street dessert — coconut milk churned to a creamy, dense ice cream, served in a hollowed half-coconut shell or cone, with toppings of roasted peanuts, sweet corn, taro, and sticky rice. Thai coconut ice cream's distinction from Western coconut-flavoured ice cream is in its simplicity and its fat source: the cream used is coconut cream and milk without dairy, and the result has a lightness and a clean coconut flavour — uncluttered by the dairy fat that makes Western ice cream rich. Thompson identifies it in *Thai Street Food* as the preparation that most completely captures the Thai street food philosophy: a single, pure ingredient expressed through correct technique.
**Ingredient precision:** - Coconut cream: 400ml, full-fat. - Coconut milk: 200ml. - Palm sugar: 80g — dissolved in a small quantity of warm coconut milk. - Salt: a generous pinch — essential for depth, as with the mango sticky rice sauce. - Pandan leaves: 2–3, briefly blended with the coconut cream for the characteristic green-fragrant note that distinguishes Thai coconut ice cream from the merely coconut-flavoured. **The preparation:** 1. Warm the coconut cream and milk gently. Add dissolved palm sugar and salt. 2. Cool completely. 3. Blend with pandan leaves briefly. Strain. 4. Churn in an ice cream machine or freeze-and-stir (freeze in a tray, stirring every 30 minutes as it solidifies, for 3 cycles — this breaks ice crystal formation and produces a smoother result than freezing unagitated). 5. Serve in a coconut shell with accompaniments. Decisive moment: The pandan infusion — the pandan's primary aromatic compound (2-acetyl-1-pyrroline — the same compound in jasmine rice) provides a floral, slightly nutty depth that is the Thai 'vanilla' — the baseline aromatic of many sweet preparations. Without it, coconut ice cream tastes only of coconut. With it, it tastes of Thailand.
*Thai Food* (2002); *Thai Street Food* (2010)