Every Flavor From Salt & Straw's Farmer's Market Series Ice Cream, Ranked

You shouldn't trust people who only order vanilla ice cream. Sure, this base flavor can help you establish a baseline for overall quality, but there comes a time and a place where you need to spread your wings and try new flavors — even if you don't think that you'll like them. And for those people who are looking to develop their ice cream palate and become comfortable with being uncomfortable, there is Salt & Straw. 

The popular ice cream brand is known for its out-of-the-ordinary ice cream flavors — it is headquartered in the equally wacky Portland, after all. But its Farmer's Market Series may be its strangest flavor lineup ever. Forget the basic coffee and chocolate chip cookie dough, this series pulls inspiration from summery ingredients you might find at your local farm stand and features a lineup of five flavors: Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread, Tomato Gelato with Olive Brittle, Melon and Prosciutto, Peach Jam Miso Blondies, and Pickled Cucumber Sorbet. I'm someone who loves experimenting with flavors, especially when it comes to desserts, so I wanted to try all of Salt & Straw's Farmer's Market Series flavors to see if they were worth buying and whether the brand was truly able to turn some of my favorite seasonal ingredients into well-balanced, flavorful, and wholly unique ice cream flavors. If one suits your fancy and you want to try it yourself, you can find them in scoop shops or on its website — but like summer, it won't last forever; the flavors will go back into the vault on August 28. 

Some recommendations are based on first-hand impressions of promotional materials and products provided by the manufacturer/distributor/etc.

I love pickles — on sandwiches, straight out of the jar, and the like. But not in ice cream (or in this case, sorbet). With all the hype about pickles in recent years, and chains like Sonic introducing pickle-flavored drinks, I'm not surprised that Salt & Straw would try to capture its pickle-loving audience with a sweet version of this pantry staple. However, it just doesn't work — and, frankly, I don't think there will ever be a world where pickle ice cream ever works out. 

This ice cream combines a Grillo's pickle brine (the best brand of pickles, obviously), puréed cucumber, dill ... and sugar. It's the sugar that transform this green, pond water-looking concoction into a frozen dessert. The flavor resonates strongly of bread and butter pickles, which are known for their cloying sweetness and almost candied consistency. Unlike a jar of these pickles, though, this sorbet doesn't have that balancing saltiness. It tastes like pickle-flavored simple syrup. Cucumber doesn't taste like anything — so there's no way it could come to the rescue, and the dill here is really only used as an aromatic enhancer, rather than a core flavor. The chemistry of this pint is also decidedly off, as, when I brought it up to temperature, I noticed that its consistency resembled a sticky, icy syrup rather than a cohesive, scoopable frozen dessert. 

I wish I could give Salt & Straw some redirection here, and it kind of feels wrong that I still love pickles and ranked this pint in dead last. Some things are just better off not as ice cream, I guess. 

Tomato gelato ... with olives. I have voiced my vehement disgust with olives before, which is to say that I didn't have high hopes for this flavor. Arbequina olive oil and lemon zest infuse with the tomato-flavored gelato, while the olive is added to a crunchy brittle that peppers the whole pint. 

I'm going to talk about the two elements of this gelato, not just because it's easier, but because the two are entirely separate entities — like angsty roommates occupying the same space despite their obvious dislike of one another. Tomato is a hard flavor to do well in an ice cream because, well, it doesn't taste like anything. Since this gelato was naturally sweet, that tomato flavor manifested more as a melon or a soft peach rather than something decidedly tomato. However, I will say that it was very fresh-tasting, on account of the generous amount of lemon zest throughout. It felt like a farmers market on my taste buds — but it just didn't feel exactly like a tomato-flavored gelato. 

Now we come to the brittle. I'm always hesitant with brittles in ice cream because they always get soggy — but this one was anything but. When I bit into one nugget of it, it tasted strongly of burnt yet crispy caramel and reminded me of the food I would find at a state fair: greasy, buttery, and almost fried. It was an excellent juxtaposition to the sweet, fruit-forward ice cream — but it wasn't the right juxtaposition. The good news is that while I could see the olive pieces in the brittle, I couldn't taste them at all. I appreciate the thought with this ice cream, but the execution just wasn't there. 

I was vegan for seven years, and still consider myself a (mostly) vegetarian. But when I saw this melon and prosciutto ice cream in the Farmer's Market Series lineup, I just knew I couldn't say no. Melon is an excellent flavor because it's acidic, sweet, and slightly honeyed, making it the perfect contrast for a salty and heavy meat like prosciutto ... on a cheese board. In an ice cream? You had me and you lost me, Salt & Straw. 

I tried the tomato gelato before the melon, so I kind of had an assumption for what the flavor of this unconventional pint was going to taste like. When I opened the lid, I immediately saw a tantalizing swirl of orange and white ice cream, peppered with tiny pieces of candied prosciutto. I was glad that there were no large hunks of meat, as I could foresee them getting chewy. That doesn't mean this issue was completely put to bed, though. When I got a piece of prosciutto, it rubbed on my molars like a piece of cold bacon. The meat didn't do much by way of flavor; it only offered a gristly texture that took away from the star of the show — the melon. 

If I could take a bath in this melon ice cream, I would. It was positively beautiful and tasted just like a fresh bowl of cantaloupe. I found myself trying to eat around the prosciutto to get to it. Unfortunately, this effort was in vain, as every mouthful was pebbled with gristle. With a little tweaking, I have high hopes for its success on Salt & Straw's menu. After all, does everything have to have meat in it?  

When I first started my foray into baking, the one ingredient I wanted to work with all the time was miso. It is, by far, my favorite ingredient in everything from chocolate chip cookies to brownies — and now, it was moonlighting in one of the most challenging roles of its career: ice cream. I had a feeling this one was going to be something special, since even the idea of basil-infused peach jam screams summer, and miso is the perfect salty foil to a sweet brownie. I might sound a little too big for my britches here, but this flavor was made for me. 

The base of this ice cream is perfectly creamy and serves as an excellent vector for the sticky peach jam. I wasn't able to pull out the basil flavor specifically in the jam, as peach takes the helm, but the slight anise-y aftertaste clued me into its presence. The blondie bits are not as salty as I was expecting them to be, but they do have an underlying umami quality that makes them the perfect pairing for the jam and the creamy base. Another thing I appreciated is that the blondies had an almost flaky quality to them. I couldn't excavate them from the pint, so I got a better distribution of blondies to jam. I also loved that it wasn't sweet; the jam offered just enough bright, peachy flavor to carry the bite.

It was a toss up between this flavor and my top pick for the first place spot. Ultimately, the underwhelming basil and miso flavors and scant amount of jam in this pint is what kept it from taking the crown. But it's by no means a bad pint, and it's a much more agreeable option than some of the lower-ranked pints I sampled. 

You've probably already had plenty of ice creams with brownies, cake, and cookie dough chunks, but I don't think that many people have gotten their hands on ones with zucchini bread pieces. This Salt & Straw flavor blends the classic summer quick bread with a chocolate ice cream base and cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. In theory, this ice cream should work; zucchini doesn't taste like much, and because it's already baked into the bread, I didn't have to worry about it tasting overtly watery or becoming icy. Plus, chocolate ice cream and warming spices are an excellent and wholly underutilized combination, especially in ice cream.

The chocolate base of this ice cream isn't too strong, and I'm honestly not mad about it. The warming spices come through on the palate first and foremost, and give my taste buds a big bear hug. The chocolate zucchini bread pieces are plentiful and scattered throughout this pint, so you never have to go digging to find a chunk. The spices are so strong and so on the money that I started to assume the zucchini bread itself was spiced.

I'm a little on the fence about whether the zucchini bread in this ice cream is truly representative of zucchini bread, though. Granted, the only way I'd be able to tell a good zucchini bread apart from a standard quick bread is the little chunks of green from the veggie. This one doesn't have any evidence of actual zucchini (though it's listed on the ingredients label). It's almost salty and nutty — like tahini — which sends you straight for a scoop of the chocolate ice cream to mellow the bite. It's compelling and, honestly, all that I could have wanted from an ice cream and more. 

I'm a self-proclaimed ice cream fiend, so I knew I had to get my hands on these Salt & Straw pints to see what all the hype was about. As a whole, Salt & Straw knocked it out of the park with this series, and aside from my lowest-ranked two pints, I think every ice cream lover can find a way to appreciate them. However, I still had to be objective and decide on a winning pint for this very close (and very sweet) race. 

To do so, I placed each pint on the counter to thaw for a little bit before diving in. Overall, the texture of the ice cream was top-notch in every pint (except for the sticky, icy mess that was the Pickled Cucumber Sorbet), so I narrowed my final ranking down to flavors, balance, and thematic coherence. The flavors in the ice cream should be easily identifiable and work together to elevate the pint as a whole. Pints with disjointed components that competed for my attention ranked lower than flavors that were cohesive, well-balanced, and interesting. This series is also all about using the bounty of nature and foods you'd find at a farmers market, so I wanted pints that were distinctly summery, light, and ones that I could see myself eating on a porch while watching summer slip away.