Six ingredients, an ice cream maker, and a day of elapsed time mostly spent waiting stand between you and a homemade vegan Nutella ice cream that scoops cleanly and tastes like the real thing. The base is roasted hazelnuts blended with melted dairy-free chocolate, thinned with light coconut milk, and churned until soft-serve smooth. Active time is short; the chilling and freezing just require patience.
Three steps matter most for a creamy result: roasting the hazelnuts properly before blending, chilling the base before churning, and pre-freezing the churn bowl a full 24 hours ahead. Skip any of those and the texture suffers. Get them right, and the rest is straightforward.
The batch yields nine half-cup servings and keeps up to a month in the freezer.
Ingredients
Yields: 9 half-cup servings
1 cup raw hazelnuts
1 cup semi-sweet dairy-free chocolate chips
2 cans (14 oz each) light coconut milk
¼ cup cane sugar (use organic if strict vegan credentials matter; some conventional cane sugar is processed with animal-derived filtering agents)
1 tsp vanilla extract
⅛ tsp sea salt
Equipment: A high-speed blender or food processor, an ice cream maker with a freezer bowl, and a freezer-safe container for hardening.
What each ingredient does
The hazelnuts and chocolate together form the hazelnut-chocolate spread that serves as both the base of the ice cream and the swirl folded in at the end. Hazelnuts bring fat, body, and flavor intensity; chocolate adds sweetness, structure, and the familiar cocoa note. The one-to-one ratio here is deliberate. Serious Eats uses a full pound of hazelnuts in a similar gelato and flags the result as "very rich." More hazelnuts mean more richness, and this recipe keeps it balanced.
Light coconut milk carries the spread into a churnable liquid. Keeping "free water" low in the base is the key mechanism for preventing oversized ice crystals. Less water means fewer crystals form during freezing, per Serious Eats. Light coconut milk produces a slightly airier result; full-fat gives a denser, more gelato-like scoop. Either works fine.
The sugar, vanilla, and salt round out the base. Nothing complicated: each adjusts flavor without changing the method.
Optional stabilizer: A tablespoon of potato starch or tapioca flour can slow ice crystal formation during storage. Home Cooks World uses potato starch in a coconut-cream frozen bar recipe a molded format, not a churned ice cream, and describes it as improving texture and reducing crystal formation. That's a meaningful difference in context, so treat this as an informed adaptation, not a tested component of this specific recipe. If the batch is headed for more than a few days in the freezer, it's worth trying. Whisk the starch into one can of coconut milk until fully dissolved before adding to the blender; added dry, it will clump.
How to make vegan Nutella ice cream without the icy texture
Step 1: Freeze the churn bowl the night before
Place the ice cream maker bowl in the freezer for a full 24 hours before churning. Minimalist Baker specifies this step explicitly; Serious Eats notes that pre-freezing the bowl is something people commonly forget. An insufficiently frozen bowl may not thicken the base properly during churning. There's no workaround — do it the night before.
Step 2: Roast the hazelnuts at 350°F (176°C)
Spread raw hazelnuts in a single layer on a bare baking sheet. Raw nuts need 10–12 minutes; already-roasted nuts need just 8–10 minutes. Roasting warms the natural oils, loosens the skins, and deepens the hazelnut flavor. All three matter for a smooth, flavorful spread.
Once out of the oven, let them cool slightly. Transfer to a kitchen towel and rub to remove most of the skins. Complete removal isn't necessary, but hazelnut skins carry mild bitterness that's more noticeable in a smooth frozen dessert than in baked goods. Get the majority off.
Step 3: Blend to a paste, then add the chocolate
Add the skinned, still-warm hazelnuts to the blender and run from low to high until they break down into a smooth paste. In a high-speed blender, this takes about 3 minutes; in a food processor, Serious Eats notes it takes around 5 minutes, with neutral oil added once the nuts begin to clump. Scrape the sides regularly either way.
Melt the chocolate separately in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly until about half the chips melt, then remove from heat and stir through or in the microwave in 30-second intervals. Add the melted chocolate to the blender and run until fully combined and smooth.
Before building the base, remove 3 tablespoons of the finished spread and set it aside in a small bowl. This becomes the swirl. Set it aside now.
Step 4: Build the base and chill it
Add the coconut milk, sugar, vanilla, and salt to the blender with the remaining spread. If using the optional stabilizer, whisk the starch into one can of coconut milk until dissolved before adding. Blend until uniform, transfer to an airtight container, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Starting the churn with a cold base matters: a warm mixture hitting a frozen bowl freezes unevenly and produces larger crystals.
Step 5: Churn for approximately 30 minutes
Add the chilled base to the pre-frozen bowl and churn per the manufacturer's instructions, roughly 30 minutes to reach soft-serve consistency. Stop when the mixture holds its shape but still looks slightly soft. Over-churning incorporates too much air, which pushes the texture toward crumbly and aerated rather than smooth, per Serious Eats.
Step 6: Fold in the swirl and freeze to firm
Transfer the churned ice cream to a freezer-safe container. Drop the reserved hazelnut-chocolate spread across the top in small spoonfuls and fold gently two or three passes. The goal is a visible swirl, not full incorporation. Press a piece of parchment directly against the surface before sealing, then freeze for at least 1 hour before serving.
Pull it from the freezer 10–15 minutes before scooping. Vegan ice cream softens and melts faster than dairy. A study published last August in MDPI's Fermentation journal found hazelnut-based vegan formulations melted completely in around 67–68 minutes versus 99 minutes for dairy ice cream. Plate and serve fairly quickly once it's scooped.
Troubleshooting
The ice cream turns icy after a few days. Ice crystals grow slowly in storage through Ostwald ripening, small crystals dissolve and redeposit onto larger ones. An airtight container with parchment pressed against the surface slows this. The optional starch stabilizer, drawn from Home Cooks World's bar recipe, may help further if the batch is destined for longer storage. This is also just normal behavior for vegan ice cream; it lacks the proteins and emulsifiers in dairy that resist crystal growth.
It won't scoop straight from the freezer. Coconut fat solidifies fully at freezer temperature. Let it sit on the counter for 10–15 minutes before serving. If it's still rock-hard after that, try the full-fat coconut milk version next time; its fat profile tempers differently.
The hazelnuts won't blend smoothly. Usually a patience or power issue. Scrape down the sides, add a small amount of neutral oil with the machine running, Serious Eats specifies this for their gelato method, and keep going. Under-blended nuts produce a gritty spread that carries straight through to the final texture.
The result is greasy or dense rather than creamy. Most often caused by a base that wasn't fully chilled before churning, or a bowl that hadn't fully frozen. Fat separates when the mixture freezes unevenly. Both steps need to be completed before the churn starts; there's no recovering from either mid-batch.
Shortcut: using store-bought vegan spread
If making the hazelnut-chocolate base from scratch isn't practical, a store-bought vegan chocolate hazelnut spread can substitute. Home Cooks World uses 150g of chocolate hazelnut spread in a coconut-cream bar recipe, a different format with different fat ratios, so treat that figure as a rough reference point rather than a direct swap.
The trade-off with any commercial version is losing control over the sweetness and fat ratios variables that the scratch recipe lets you tune.
Why this works, and where to take it next
A finished batch comes in at roughly 277 calories per half-cup serving, with 21g fat and 17g sugar. The fat is structural: hazelnut and coconut fat are doing actual work on texture and mouthfeel.
Once you've made it once, the hazelnut-to-chocolate ratio is the obvious dial to turn on batch two. Pull back on the chocolate and the flavor goes nuttier, fat content rises, and creaminess generally improves. Add more chocolate, and the result gets sweeter and firmer. Switching from light to full-fat coconut milk is the single fastest change for a denser, more gelato-like scoop, same method, noticeably different result. Whichever direction you take it, press the parchment back against the surface when it goes in the freezer, and give it a counter rest before serving.
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