Ice Cream Taste Test Report
The results are in. I organized a blind taste test of four respected vanilla ice creams using my boyfriend, the vanilla fan, as judge. The clear winner: HAAGEN DAZS! It won handily, based on both taste and texture. Second was a tie between Ben & Jerry's and Ronnybrook Farm, and fourth place went to Ciao Bella. Now in defense of Ciao Bella, I must admit that the pint I bought in their outlet turned out to have been partly melted & refrozen, ruining the texture. But the judge insisted that, regardless of the texture, the taste wasn't as intense as the others. I was very impressed with Ciao Bella's vanilla the one time I had it, and it should also be noted that it is a gelato rather than a high-butterfat premium ice cream and thus maybe shouldn't even be compared with the others. I guess I'll have to repeat the test sometime; any suggestions on other worthy ice creams (available in the NYC area) that should be included?
I'll report the results when he tests chocolate ice creams on me.
Cloudy
Sep 03, 2001 08:16PM
I think I have under-appreciated HDazs for a long time, eating B&J in preference to it because I like the chunky stuff in it. I had a serving of HD coffee a month or so ago and was really impressed by it -- it had much more flavor (and less intensely sweet) than the B&J stuff. To be fair I was not comparing same flavors -- I don't even know if B&J has a coffee flavor -- but I had noticed the same thing about HD chocolate a few months before that. I reckon I am a convert.
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Have you tried HD's gelato yet? Omigod - velvet on a spoon! So far, my favorite is coconut, followed by tiramisu, then raspberry - but, there are 4 or 5 more I haven't tried yet. And, their regular coconut-pineapple is "eat a carton in one sitting" good!!!
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Try the hazelnut gelato!
This is my overwhelming favorite! Well....favorite uh lets see..... the tiramisu is also killer...uhhhh. What can I say? Awesome stuff!
Chow!!!
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Really?
I tried the Hazelnut once for kicks and was really non-plussed. It was too sweet and had a weird aftertaste to remind me of the fact that it was hazelnut flavored and not truly gelato. Perhaps it has changed....I hope so!
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Coffee ice cream lovers (well, this one, anyway) know there's no point in doing a coffee taste test because HD's would totally kill any competition. And that includes the new, overly complicated Starbuck's varieties.
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No Breyers? As much as I love HD, I've always considered Breyers to have the premium vanilla, with plenty o' bean in it. (To reinforce my theory -- at least, I think it reinforces it -- every single Chinese restaurant I've ever eaten dessert in serves what is unmistakably Breyers vanilla.)
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Yes, Breyer's should definitely be in the follow-up test. But if I'm not mistaken, it has a significantly lower butterfat content than HD; it'll be interesting to see if it can compete in terms of texture. It was my favorite, too, before HD came along.
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If I remember correctly, the vanilla bean flecks in Breyer's end up being more for show than anything else. They come from the vanilla pod instead of the bean itself- while the beans are full of flavor, the pod flecks have almost no flavor at all. The butterfat content does play a big role in how good the ice cream is- more butterfat makes for a creamier, richer product. However, another important part that's often overlooked is something called overrun- it's how much air has been whipped into the ice cream. Ice creams always have air whipped into them- if they didn't, you would have a big solid block of sweet, creamy ice. Generally, as more air gets whipped in, the texture becomes much lighter. Usually, the big tubs of ice cream will have close to the legal limit of overrun to be called ice cream, 100 percent. This means that half of every budget ice cream (as well as Breyers and Dreyer's/Edy's) is nothing but air. The superpremium brands such as Haagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry's, and Dreamery have about 20-25 percent overrun, making for a denser, richer product. Added bonus: Since those have less air, they don't melt nearly as quickly.
Quick tip- the easy way to see how much overrun an ice cream has is to weigh it. A gallon of ice cream cannot weigh less than 4 1/2 pounds- the other half of the gallon is weightless air.
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none of this makes Breyer's inferior. Breyer's Natural Vanilla is still my favorite because of its fresh, pure taste (not French Vanilla), and I think all-natural ingredients do account to some degree for quality (most other brands add stabilizers). High overrun doesn't really determine the quality of an ice cream - just the texture. The previously-mentioned Cooks' Illustrated article makes this point clear, especially as several of the top-rated brands were high-overrun. It isn't universally true that a dense, buttery ice cream is going to be preferred to a light, creamy one. It's all a matter of individual preference, obviously. (by the way, Ciao Bella hazelnut, a dense buttery specimen if ever I saw one, is one of my very favorites!)
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I'm a Breyers fan, too, but it took me a while to get there--I ate mostly Haagen Dazs as a kid. I became more of a Breyers fan when my girlfriend pointed out that the "chocolate" chips in Haagen Dazs mint chip ice cream aren't real chocolate, but coagulations of palm oil. That's why they don't call it "mint chocolate chip!"
I just wanted to note, though, that some of newer Breyers flavors (especially those that incorporate candy) _do not_ contain only simple, natural ingredients--so take a look at the side of the carton before buying if that's important to you.
Matt
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Haagen-Dazs mint chip ice cream ingredients: Cream, Skim Milk (Lactose Reduced), Sugar, Chocolate Flavoured Chips (Sugar, Coconut Oil, Cocoa Processed With Alkali, Butter Oil, Soy Lecithin, Natural Flavour), Egg Yolk, Corn Syrup, Natural Mint Flavour, Salt, Soy Lecithin.
Does the competition offer superior ingredients?
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Well, Haagen-Dazs is purportedly produced with the use of rBGH, or Bovine Growth Hormone. Some ice cream producers pledge not to buy milk from farms that use rBGH (which gives the cows mastitis, requiring them to be milked up to three times a day), and state this on the label.
I believe Ben & Jerry's, even with its deterioration in quality, still claims it doesn't buy milk from farms that use rBGH.
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how about real chocolate chips?
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I've tried a few of the premium brands and HD comes out tops every time. I can't stand the overly sweet B&J and their chunks are the pits. I probably would have loved B&J when I was 10 and could eat sugar sandwiches.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Edy's is branded as Breyer's in the western part of the US.
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No. In the Western part of the US it is known as Dreyer's (easy to see the confusion!). Dreyer's is actually the company name as well. Breyer's is owned by Unilever.
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So is Breyers better than Dreyers? And is HG better than Breyers? I've always bought Dreyers Grand because I thought they were supposed to be the best, but I haven't tried the others lately.
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Thanks for the correction. And I think Breyer's is better than Dreyer's, especially their fresh fruit flavors (e.g., peach).
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Curiosity piqued by this discussion, I thought I'd compare a few of the ice cream brands mentioned in this thread. I pulled a half gallon of Breyer's strawberry ice cream from the Ralphs supermarket freezer and put it in my cart. When I pulled out a carton of Haagen Dazs ice cream, I realized that the contents had melted. In fact, every container of ice cream in that very large freezer had melted. So only the Breyer's--from a separate freezer--came home with me from Ralphs. (By the way, I'm referring to the Ralphs in west Los Angeles on Pico at Barrington.) The Breyer's reassures with its list of ingredients--only milk, cream, sugar and strawberries--but lets down the buyer when the carton is opened. The overrun in this product is very high and the texture is utterly unacceptable. It's like hardened foam. I hope that no one would dispute assertions that Breyer's tastes good--the flavor is excellent and the large pieces of strawberries put it in a league with Haagen Dazs--but only if you ignore the fluffy, light texture. I hope that Ralphs disposed of the thawed ice cream, because if the management elected to refreeze it after I tipped them off to the melty disaster several hundred cartons of ice cream in that store had freezer burn.
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Cook's Magazine did a vanilla tasting in the most recent issue and Edy's Dreamery and a brand called Double Rainbow finished at the top of the list.
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I don't know about NYC availability but if it's butterfat you're looking for the Santa Barbara based McConnell's ice cream can't be beat. Much more buttery tasting than the other premium brands mentioned. After a spoonful, you literally have to lick the butter off your lips!
Some random reflections on Haagen Dazs: First of all, the name. You've got to hand it to whatever stoned 70s wordsmith (it was the 70s wasn't it?) that came up with it. As linguistically silly as the name is, it's become a permanent and unquestioned part of our lexicon. Not only because the ice cream tastes good, but also because it SOUNDS good... Now the texture. I do think it's changed, even if not as dramatically as B n Js. I remember when I was a kid having patiently to wait for the ice cream to soften -- that is the times I wasn't trying to hurry things by throwing the carton over and over against the kitchen counter. Nowadays, you can practically dig your spoon right in. Still creamy, and harder than Breyers/Dreyers, but definitely softer than the original recipe. Or so it seems to me... That brings us to the new-fangled HD varities, like the gelatto mentioned below. I also was a fan -- for, say, about ten cartons -- but it's so friggin sweet (cf all those discussions of the American sweet tooth on this board) that I got kinda sick of it. That said, I have to admit that my very favorite kind of HD (ice cream not gelatto) is the recently introduced Dulce De Leche, also sweet as can be. And pretty soft, come to think of it...
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Jim just reminded me of this wondeful artisanal ice cream when he mentioned it in his Yak-cheese post above.
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Unfortunately out of business.
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oh how tragic!!
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Oh! I don't know if you can get Bassett's in NY (it's from philadelphia), but the chocolate, dark chocolate and double chocolate chip are divine - if you're doing a chocolate taste test.
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