The Big Mistake Ree Drummond Says Ruined Her Green Tea Ice Cream

Often enjoyed for dessert at the end of a meal, green tea ice cream is a creamy, refreshingly earthy sweet treat that's been devoured in the United States since it rose in popularity in the late 1990s. Though it's easy to pick up a pint of green tea or matcha ice cream at the grocery store, making it yourself is a little trickier, even for a seasoned food blogger and television personality Ree Drummond, aka "The Pioneer Woman."

Drummond's matcha mishap came about when she made green tea ice cream for an investment club meeting. "Instead of using matcha or green tea powder, I actually bought green tea bags, ground the tea in the food processor and then used that in the ice cream base," Drummond admitted in the Spring 2025 issue of The Pioneer Woman magazine. "It looked like mossy green sludge... there were about 23 bowls, and no one ate any of it." Although Drummond says she now buys green tea ice cream, making it is not too difficult if you use matcha powder instead of bagged green tea leaves.

Although they both come from the same evergreen shrub (Camellia sinensis), there's a lot that separates matcha powder from green tea. Matcha is made from green tea leaves that spent the last several weeks in the shade to increase chlorophyll levels for a bright green color. The leaves are then steamed and ground into a fine powder. For green tea, they're entirely sun-grown, then they're quickly heated to avoid oxidation before being rolled and dried.

When you brew a creamy matcha tea or use it to make a batch of green tea ice cream, the concentrated flavor doesn't dissolve into the liquids. Instead, it's suspended, so you're essentially ingesting the entire leaf. Because matcha powder is so fine, the texture of your homemade green tea ice cream will still be smooth, if a touch powdery, with an intense green color and sweet, grassy flavor. Because green tea leaves are steeped and then removed, both the flavor and color are much less intense, making them unsuitable for ice cream. But grinding them into a powder also doesn't work because the anti-oxidation process also makes them quite bitter. And the sun-grown leaves contain less chlorophyll, yielding a duller color as well. 

Perhaps one day, Drummond will try her hand at green tea ice cream again. But next time, she should opt for a well-reviewed matcha powder instead, like the nuanced Naoki Matcha Powder, affordable Everyday Matcha Powder, or Chamberlain Coffee Matcha, which many reviewers like for its smooth texture.