Watching “Free Guy” made me hungry for the titular character’s favorite flavor of ice cream: bubble gum.

This vegan, gluten-free bubble gum ice cream recipe makes approximately 2 pints, or 6-8 “servings.”

“Gumball” Ingredients
2 tablespoons water
3 ounces vegan blue dye powder
1 teaspoon bubble gum extract
4.4 ounces vegan, gluten-free gum paste

Ice Cream Ingredients
0.25 cups frozen “gumballs”
1.5 cups oat milk
11.2 ounces vegan creamer
2 teaspoons bubble gum extract
0.25 cups sugar
remaining “gumballs” (mix-in)

Instructions
First, you will need to make your “gumballs.”

Mix the blue dye, bubble gum extract and water.

Form the gum paste into balls then roll them through the dye mixture. Freeze them for at least 4 hours.

Once the balls have frozen, pour all of the ice cream ingredients into your blender, reserving the additional gumballs for the mix-in stage.

Start with the gumballs and pour the milk, cream, extract and sugar over the top.

Pulse until there are no longer large bits of gum.

What happens next depends on your ice cream maker. If you have a more standard one, you’ll pull your chilled (for 24 hours) bowl out and make the ice cream.

If you have one like mine, you pour the mixture into the pints then freeze them for 24 hours.

After that time, you put the pint into your ice cream maker and let it do its magic.

For an extra burst of bubble gum, add the additional “gumballs” in there at the end of a normal ice cream maker’s cycle or using the mix-in setting if you have one like mine.

Serve and enjoy with “Free Guy!”

The Easy Route
Finding blue gum paste might make this a tad bit easier. I couldn’t find a vegan one that didn’t come in a giant pail (who needs that much blue gum paste?!).

Of course, just buying yourself a pint or two of vegan bubble gum ice cream is an option, if you can find it. Please share the details in the comments if you know of one.

The Pairing
In “Free Guy,” Ryan Reynolds plays the titular character, Guy, a non-player character (NPC) in a popular video game called Free City.

He is fascinated by the avatar of Jodie Comer’s character, Millie, and starts expanding his world, from small things like ordering a cappuccino to standing up to bank robbers that are avatars of the people playing the game in the real world.

The NPCs refer to the avatars as the sunglasses people, and things really take a turn when Guy takes a pair of sunglasses from a robber.

He puts them on and quickly discovers that his reality is a game, where he can restore his health, grab money and upgrade his wardrobe.

Two of the game’s programmers, Keys (Joe Keery) and Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar), quickly discover what Guy did, assume he’s a player violating the rules and enter the game as cop avatars to take him down.

We quickly learn that Millie and Keys developed the game together a few years prior, and a big company came in to buy the game and potentially exploit the AI they developed to take it in a different direction. They now have a fractured relationship, as Millie left the company and is trying to prove how evil the CEO, Antwan (Taika Waititi), is, and of course, Keys still works there as a programmer.

Guy follows Millie’s avatar during her attempt to prove Antwan’s wrongdoing, and they eventually team up after Guy becomes a viral internet sensation for being a rare “good guy” in the game, a.k.a. Blue Shirt Guy.

As fascinating as the plot of the movie is, I also love a lot of the detail that is put into the world of the game. From one of the programmers showing up in a bunny costume instead of a cop uniform to a background character struggling to move around and repeatedly running into a wall, there are a lot of details that any level of gamer, from novice to expert, will find entertaining.

On a footnote, I planned on publishing this blog post this week for months, but I love that it is coming out during the first week of the SAG-AFTRA strike and the continuing WGA strike, mirroring some themes and scenes in the plot of the movie. “Free Guy” has a lot to say about misuse of technology and corporate greed. I hope the striking creatives can get their needs met and continue to tell moving and entertaining stories like this one for decades to come.

If you decide to make bubble gum ice cream and/or watch “Free Guy,” let us know! Tag us in your Instagram posts & stories, tweets or TikTok videos: @veg_out_recipes