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Ice Cream

Started by dr_christian_troy, October 13, 2020, 05:47:40 PM

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dr_christian_troy

I used to be more of a lolly-loving folk, but these days I've had a greater need for ice cream. I've had a recent craving but the one ice cream I love cannot be found anywhere. Butterscotch. It's like gold dust these days and Salted Caramel is not the same. Loxley's (?) used to do Butterscotch but it seems to be lost to time like tears in a van. I really fancy Banana Nut (the one that Howard Hughes lived on for years) or Rum and Raisin in particular.

I think I've had too much Ben & Jerry's in recent years to the point I'm now more interested in Haagen Dasz when I'm in the mood. What are your ice cream recommendations? Are there any ice creams (or indeed, lollies) no longer available that you have a yearning for from time to time?


Hand Solo

I've heard making a Balsamic reduction and pouring it over ice cream is meant to be good.

Is it any good? Vinegar and ice cream seem anathema like salt and chocolate but some people seem to think they go together.

Peanut butter ice cream is the king of ice creams, in my opinion.

shiftwork2

Never even remotely rated Ben & Jerry's.  It seemed like the early to mid 90s needed an alternative to the hegemony of Haagen Dazs and they just got lucky.  It's still there with unappealing names liked Fish Food and Speedo Skidmark.

Mackie's is really good for the more traditional flavours.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Quote from: shiftwork2 on October 13, 2020, 05:58:16 PM
Never even remotely rated Ben & Jerry's.  It seemed like the early to mid 90s needed an alternative to the hegemony of Haagen Dazs and they just got lucky.  It's still there with unappealing names liked Fish Food and Speedo Skidmark.

Mackie's is really good for the more traditional flavours.

Ben & Jerry's flavours are shit (or should I say lack of flavours - most of their range is just vanilla or chocolate ice cream with different shaped bits in), but the actual quality of the ice cream is far higher. Obviously it's more expensive but you get higher quality ingredients versus many others and it shows. It is indulgent and properly creamy as it melts - it isn't gelato standard but given it's from a tub it's pretty good. They appear to genuinely care about refugees too (not that that has anything to do with it, but it's a plus)

There's something incredibly sterile and joyless about Haagen Dazs that I can't quite put my finger on it, like getting a handjob from a disinterested asexual. Christopher Nolan does ice cream. Even their wackier ones 'Look, cookies and cream, we're keeping up!' rouse the senses no more than a dormouse gnawing the sinew of a dead leg.

touchingcloth

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on October 13, 2020, 06:10:44 PM
They appear to genuinely care about refugees too

Can I just shock you? They don't. What do you think the real story about those Vietnamese lads in the Essex lorry trailer was?

Shoulders?-Stomach!

QuoteCan I just shock you?

Err, you didn't wait for me to give my permission. I withhold permission for you to shock me.

Inspector Norse

Ha, I like Haagen Daz but there is something a bit surprise-averse about it, like their R&D department is one bloke leafing through a magazine from the 1920s.

You're right about Ben and Jerrys too, the core ice-cream-with-some-kind-of-chunks thing is good but many of their wackier varieties are a bit crap.

There's a good one here called Djurgårds Glass - I like their apple pie flavour, or the Caribbean chocolate coconut one.

A lot of on-the-go ice cream is disappointing. Unless you're actually in Italy.

Shit Good Nose

Huge ice cream fan here, although I am quite picky.

As has been said, both Ben & Jerry's and Haagen Dazs are genuinely premium ice creams with decent quality ingredients.  I like quite a few of the B&J flavours - cookie dough is an old classic, Minter Wonderland is a very good mint, Strawberry Cheesecake is one of my favourites (although you can only find it in the scoop shops now, and there aren't too many of those left in the UK any more - mostly in cinemas [at least for as long as they carry on going]).  Although my all-time favourite B&J flavour - Chubby Hubby - was killed off in the UK about 20 years ago sadly.  The actual ice cream is usually better than the name.

HD do it well - relatively few flavours and keeping ingredients to the necessary minimum, and they don't change very often.  They do the best plain vanilla of all the global players and their Peanut Butter Crunch is, probably, my favourite flavour at that end of the market.

Drop down the ladder a bit and Kelly's is pretty fucking good - you can really taste the cream in theirs.  They also do a very very very good whippy.

The Cadbury's tubs - particularly flake - are quite tasty, and much nicer (and very different) from their cone equivalents.  The actual ice cream in the tub versions seems to be better quality than what they put in the cones - the tub ice cream melts to a single cream type consistency rather than an airy/foamy mousse type consistency (a good guide for the quality of ice cream - liquid cream=good ingredients and density of them, airy/foamy mousse=cheaper ingredients and lots of air pumped in to increase volume).  Similarly, the Oreo and Daim tubs are good, with Oreo being much nicer than HD's Cookies and Cream (in my opinion).

Of the supermarket own brands - Aldi and Lidl cookie dough are both good (and interchangeable), but I've been disappointed with the rest of their flavours.  Props to Lidl for attempting pistachio, but it's too fake and sweet (as in candy-sweets) to rival a decent pistachio like Tesco Finest and Waitrose No.1.  Waitrose is probs the best all around, with Tesco Finest in close second.  Sainsbury's and Morrisons I've always been disappointed by, either with poor/bland flavour or cheap consistency.  Amazingly I've never tried any of M&S's ice creams.

Once you get down to the regional artisan stuff (purely what's available in shops and supermarkets, this is) it's rare you'll find shit, but on the other hand it's that much harder to get hold of.  Marshfield Farm, Chew Moos, Mendip Moments, Antonio Fedorici, Minghella's, and Winstones are all sterling and have been available either in national supermarkets, delis or farm shops at one time or another.

Biggest disappointments - Carte D'or (which isn't much better than basic Walls [which owns it]) and Joe Delucci's sold in tubs in Tesco (COMPLETELY different quality from what you get in the JD scoop shops - may as well be a different company making it [which it may well be]).

I avoid Walls, Magnum and lower-tier supermarket own like the plague.

Also, literally the only decent dairy free one I've ever had is Swedish Glace (available in most big supermarkets).  All the others - including B&J and the artisan likes of Booja Booja - taste weird at best, like they've gone off at worst.


I also make my own and have a Gaggia gelato machine, and numerous recipe books.  Biggest successes for me have been mint choc chip (using two different types of garden mint and some primo 85% dark choc nibs), peanut butter (a sweet peanut butter ice cream with an unsweetened smooth peanut butter swirl), Hugh Stock-Whitting-Stock's vanilla (best vanilla recipe I've tried), dark toffee, pistachio, and a hazelnut ice cream I made from nuts collected from local hedgerows.  Amazing though the hazelnut was, I doubt I'd make it again because of the ballache in shelling them, and you need a LOT of hazelnuts to impart a decent hazelnut flavour.  Using shop bought ready shelled nuts just leaves you with a bland and very mild nut flavour.

Ice cream!


Shit Good Nose

Quote from: bgmnts on October 13, 2020, 09:14:08 PM
Tends to be the case.

Why does everything so bad for you have to taste so nice?!?!?!, etc etc (has mild heart attack whilst typing sentence and shrugs it off)

Capt.Midnight

Big fan of M&S's knock-off Cornettos. Especially the caramel one.

Dex Sawash

Costco (america) does a "super premium" ice cream that I can only describe as chewy. It is very good but only available in vanilla.

BTW, mark me on the "likes ice cream" list

Emma Raducanu

Whenever I'm on holiday, I call into one of those gelato kiosk bars where all the ice creams are displayed sexily in the counter. They're always belting.

One of those in the late morning followed by Al fresco lunch followed by beer in a park with views overlooking the town. That's Europe for me.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Dex Sawash on October 13, 2020, 09:18:36 PM
Costco (america) does a "super premium" ice cream that I can only describe as chewy.

That could be cos they add a shit-load of protein powder to make it very dense (even more dense than yer B&J and HD), which doesn't actually make it premium, however some of the high-end gelatarias in Italy and middle-eastern ice cream can have a chewy consistency due to things like mastic or sahlab that prevent them from melting so quickly and also help intensify the flavour.

My knowledge of American ice cream - besides the just the names - is very lacking.  One of many examples of American food I didn't have time to indulge in when me and Mrs Nose honeymooned in San Francisco.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

The names of Ben and Jerry ice creams could easily be the names of eliquids.

Ptolemy Ptarmigan

I like Birds Eye Arctic Roll.

tldr? I am scum.

flotemysost

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on October 13, 2020, 09:11:06 PM
my all-time favourite B&J flavour - Chubby Hubby

Was that one voted for by Mumsnet posters? (Not sure I'm in the mood for Googling "chubby hubby b j")

Good shout with Minghella's, some fond memories of childhood holidays to Salcombe there.

ProvanFan

My father was Mr Gino Ginelli

pigamus

Whatever happened to raspberry ripple?

touchingcloth

My dad used to work at an ice cream factory when he was about 14. One of his favourite stories to tell is how the production line would switch from making branded to supermarket-own stuff through the simple expedient of changing which tubs the same nozzles squirted their slop into. "We used to get customers writing in saying your ice cream is beautiful, so much better than Tesco's!!!!!!"

About fifteen years ago Aldi had a line of ice cream branded as Milfina, one of which was a caramel ice cream with chunks of caramel in. That was great stuff.

The Mollusk

Their zany ideas might be lame as fuck but Ben & Jerry's vegan ice cream is the absolute bee's knees.

That would be a good flavour idea actually. Bee's Knees. Honeycomb and chocolate flavour with little bits of bee mixed in. Creamy crunchy buzzy fuzzy fun.

The unicorn ice cream from Lidl is sublime.

bgmnts

Quote from: The Mollusk on October 14, 2020, 06:55:14 AM
Their zany ideas might be lame as fuck but Ben & Jerry's vegan ice cream is the absolute bee's knees.

Definitely.

Thursday

Those Nuii Ice Cream's are a superior alternative to the Magnum style of Ice creams, the berry one being by far the best.

frajer

Quote from: Thursday on October 14, 2020, 08:55:39 AM
Those Nuii Ice Cream's are a superior alternative to the Magnum style of Ice creams, the berry one being by far the best.

Took a punt on a box of Nuiis the other week and liked them a lot. Macademia nut and salted caramel. Good quality chocolate. 4 stars.

touchingcloth

Ice cream is mental: cream, sugar, flavourings like vanilla or chocolate, great big tubs of the stuff - on paper it shouldn't be any good, yet somehow it's just crazy enough to work.

Buelligan

I have a friend who makes and sells her own ice cream with milk from her own organic herd.  It's very good indeed.  She also makes all the stuff like caramel or pistachio butter to go in it, all bio of course.  I'm trying to persuade her to invest in a Peugeot H van to sell it from - for the tourists.  All she'd need is the bodywork, just set it up on her land by the road with a few stools and skim those lovely dollars right off the top.  I laugh a little but her ice cream really is extremely good.  Secret being, she's an excellent maker and uses only home grown, organic and high quality ingredients.  No corners cut, ever.

Best weird flavour I ever made myself was green tea with a jasmine flower garnish.  Looked beautiful and tasted delicately delicious.

My missus picked up some Ben & Jerry's Netflix & Chill'd (sic) which I presumed would come with a code for a month of free Netflix or something but, no, just a random branding exercise. It's basically got salty pretzels and brownie in it. Not a fan.

Really liking Snickers ice cream bars at the mo'.

Quote from: Buelligan on October 14, 2020, 12:23:12 PM
I have a friend who makes and sells her own ice cream with milk from her own organic herd.

I'm reading that as breast milk and I won't be persuaded otherwise.

Buelligan

Yes, and that seems wrong.  I think it probably is wrong.  Try to make yourself think of spunk every time milk is mentioned, see if that helps.  Otherwise, report yourself to the appropriate authority.