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Binging with Babish: Sea Salt Ice Cream from Kingdom Hearts

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Andrew Rea finally tackles the one dessert every Kingdom Hearts fan has been begging Binging with Babish to make.

On August 6, 2019, Rea released his take on Sea Salt Ice Cream, the neon-teal treat that Roxas, Axel, and Xion pass back and forth on the Twilight Town clock tower throughout the Disney and Square Enix crossover series. Rea has never touched a Kingdom Hearts controller in his life, but the recipe requests had piled up long enough that he decided to solve the problem the way he solves every fictional food problem: from scratch, with real technique behind it.

• Rea opens the episode admitting he’s never played the games himself, taking on the recreation purely because viewers kept asking for it.
• His formula swaps a traditional egg-custard base for an egg-free cornstarch custard mixed with dissolved gelatin and roughly 7.5 ounces of glucose syrup, tinted with teal gel food dye to match the game’s signature aqua bar.
• The bars set for 6 hours to overnight in popsicle molds with centered wooden sticks before being released under warm running water.

From Gelato Concept to No-Churn Popsicle

Rea starts the episode by floating an idea rooted in gelato al fior di latte — the simple, milk-forward Italian style — before pivoting away from a churned ice cream entirely. The in-game dessert isn’t a scoop in a cup; it’s a rectangular bar on a stick, and that shape dictates the whole approach. Getting clean edges and a scoopable-but-sliceable texture without an ice cream maker meant building a recipe specifically engineered for molds rather than a machine.

Building the Cornstarch Custard Base

The base itself combines 1½ cups whole milk with 1½ cups heavy cream, ¾ cup sugar, and 1 teaspoon of sea salt — the ingredient that gives the dessert its name and its trademark sweet-salty balance in the games. Instead of egg yolks, Rea thickens the mixture with cornstarch and gelatin, then works in the glucose syrup, which helps keep the finished bars smooth and free of the ice crystals that plague a lot of homemade frozen treats. He heats everything on the stovetop just long enough to hydrate the thickeners and fully dissolve the sugar before straining the mixture to knock out any lumps.

I’ve never played it, but I am your humble servant in the recreation of the foods from fiction, so as always, I’ll do my darnedest.

Molding, Chilling, and the Twilight Town Payoff

Once the base is tinted to that unmistakable teal-green with gel food dye, Rea transfers it into a piping bag so he can fill upright popsicle molds without air pockets or mess. Wooden sticks go in dead center, and the molds go into the freezer for anywhere from six hours to overnight. To release them cleanly, he runs the molds under warm water rather than forcing them out, which keeps the rectangular shape intact — the same shape Roxas hands to Axel and Xion on the clock tower in the games.

Rea’s channel has made a habit of chasing these kinds of pop-culture cravings, the same instinct that’s driven other creators toward trailers for games like Apex Legends: Defiance or breakdowns tied to franchises such as Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. For Kingdom Hearts fans, though, the real test isn’t the trailer — it’s whether that first bite off the stick actually tastes the way it looks on the Twilight Town clock tower, and Rea’s cornstarch-and-gelatin fix says more about getting the texture right than any amount of teal food dye ever could.