Chocolate Malts

Here is something I have never understood.  Why would someone have a chocolate milkshake when they could have a chocolate malt?

And let’s put aside the regional specifications of milkshakes, frappes, and the like.  I’m talking about ice cream and milk, blended with malt powder.  A chocolate milkshake is fine and dandy, but it never really goes the extra mile.  Let’s be honest.  It’s really just plain ice cream that’s been thinned out so it can be sipped through a straw.  But put in a few scoops of malt powder, and it is transformed into something else entirely.

I learned about chocolate malts as a boy at the elbow of my grandfather Pop-Pop.  He took the creation of chocolate malts seriously, even going so far as to buy a soda-fountain-style blender with a metal tin to ensure a proper consistency.

There were two big lessons I took with me.
1)    Chocolate malts are only as good as the ice cream you use.  And Pop-Pop insisted on Häagen-Dazs.
2)    Chocolate malts are made with chocolate ice cream.  Vanilla ice cream is for vanilla malts.

To this day, I am shocked and amazed at how many establishments try to pass off a beverage made with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup as a chocolate malt (or heaven forbid should malt powder be unavailable, a chocolate milkshake).

Chocolate syrup has its own unique and distinctive flavor profile that is completely different from that of chocolate ice cream.  This is the kind of nonsense that is perpetrated at McDonalds, but should not be tolerated at a place that actually scoops ice cream and crafts drinks by hand.  Come on.

The problem has become so widespread that I am compelled whenever I go out to confirm that indeed the chocolate malts are made with chocolate ice cream.

It turns out that there are some establishments that want to sell these frozen treats, but do not have the storage capacity for different flavors of ice cream.  So they only stock vanilla, and doll it up to accommodate patron preferences.  Sure, in Providence, Rhode Island they drink coffee milk, which is sweetened coffee syrup added to cold milk.  But if I want a coffee milkshake, it better be made with coffee ice cream, dammit.

There is a lot of ice cream in upstate New York.  But much of it is soft serve.  Stewart’s would be equipped to make a good malt if their ice cream was just better.

But it’s not.  It’s gummy, with a lot of overrun.  But it is similar to Häagen-Dazs in that both would seem to contain rBGH (neither makes the claim that their milk is devoid of growth hormone).

On the other hand, Ben & Jerry’s, which is free of rBGH, adds gums to their ice cream.  Gums, just to be clear, are different from bubble gum.  Gums are food additives that give the impression of fattiness, and aid in a creamy mouthfeel, without all that expensive (but irreplaceable) milk fat.  I am pretty sure this change at Ben & Jerry’s happened after the original founders left the company.

It’s all about tradeoffs.

Pop-Pop has seen better days.  He can’t really eat solid food.  Recently my mother picked him up some chocolate ice cream.  I dutifully asked her, “What kind?”  And she wasn’t sure.  Mom bought whatever kind they had downstairs at the hospital. “But he loved it,” she told me.

I just wish I could bring him a good chocolate malt.