You can make ice cream at home with just a few ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, and something for flavor, like vanilla or cocoa. A few dairy ice creams sold in grocery stores have a similar ingredients list. But frozen desserts—dairy and nondairy—often contain additives, such as a variety of gums (guar, locust bean), starches and fibers (corn, chicory root), sugar substitutes (allulose, erythritol), and proteins (fava bean, pea).
In dairy ice cream, some of those ingredients, particularly the gums, are added to increase shelf life or to keep sugar crystals from freezing, says Robert F. Roberts, PhD, a food scientist. “But nondairy desserts may need these and other additives to help the product behave more like ice cream,” he says.
For example, casein, a protein found naturally in milk, helps…
