Ice Cream: Out the Window

Well, this is embarrassing. And if you know anything about me, it’s that when I’m embarrassed about something, I’m compelled to share it.

Just yesterday, I wrote about how when it comes to ice cream, there are no good choices when it comes to national brands. You have to make some kind of tradeoff between food gums, antibiotics and hormones.

I actually do own an ice cream machine. It’s one of those easy Cuisinart ones. My little sister gave it to me as a present years ago. And we use it occasionally. My experience has been that the ice cream is amazing when it’s first mixed, but I’ve never been able to make anything that I’ve liked after it’s sat in the freezer overnight. It just gets hard and chunky.

Don’t you dare tell me I need to use cream with mono and diglycerides or carrageenan.

So the obvious question is, “Well, what kind of ice cream DO you keep in your freezer.” After all, I’m still human, and ice cream is still a food group. I think my friends at Price Chopper will fall off their chairs when they hear the answer.

I’d like to say it’s Haagen Dazs. And sometimes it is. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite ice creams and if they came out with an organic version I would be all over that. I love their kitchen cabinet ingredients and I love the ice cream’s density and low air content.

But when I hear that it’s made with the finest ingredients I get so angry. Because while for many of their ingredients that might be quite true, they are still using conventional milk and cream. Even Walmart’s store brand of fluid milk is labeled with a pledge that’s opposed to rBST, but no such pledge can be found on a Haagen Dazs carton.

So most of the time I pass it by.

But in its place I do pick up something from one of my former clients. It may very well have the longest list of ingredients out of anything in our house.

I figure if I can’t get what I want in an ice cream, instead I’ll go for something that’s cheap, tasty, and doesn’t have a lot of fat or calories. That means if you were to look in my freezer on any given day, you’d most likely find a carton of Edy’s Slow Churned Low Fat Light Ice Cream.

Officially it’s not even ice cream. Ice cream by definition has to have a specific percentage of butterfat. This doesn’t. But I do happen to know a bit more about the “Slow Churned” process than your average bear, and it’s pretty interesting. I don’t know the mechanics or the science behind it, but they figured out an extrusion process that breaks up the fat molecules and more evenly distribute them through the finished product. That way a lesser amount of fat is perceived to be equally creamy and delicious.

The secret to getting a good Edy’s Slow Churned ice cream is to choose one with bits in it. Otherwise the texture seems a bit odd. But right now we’ve been eating the seasonal limited edition flavor of Thin Mint. It has crushed up Girl Scout cookies, so it scratches that itch too. Actually, I think it’s better than eating the cookies on their own. How Dreyer’s can live with themselves knowing they are stealing cookie sales from little girls is beyond me. But the Samoas flavor is fun too.

As it turns out, I’ll eat this ice cream a spoonful at a time. Mrs. Fussy on the other hand eats more than her fair share of the stuff. Often Young Master Fussy and I will hide it from her in the garage freezer, lest she find it and consume the contents before we’ve had a chance to enjoy a bowl ourselves.

So she doesn’t want it in the house. I think it’s disgusting, and filled with dreck, so I don’t want it in the house. Yet into the house it comes with surprising regularity. It’s the darnedest thing.

Just to show you, here are the ingredients to Fudge Tracks, one of Young Master Fussy’s favorite flavors:

Milk, Skim Milk, Cream, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Fudge Swirl (Sugar, Skim Milk, Corn Syrup, Cream, Water, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Bitter Chocolate, Modified Tapioca Starch, Sodium Alginate, Salt), Peanut Butter Cups (This Ingredient is Processed in a Facility that Processes Peanuts and Tree Nuts) [Coating (Sugar, Coconut Oil, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Milk, Skim Milk, Partially Hydrogenated Palm Oil, Soy Lecithin, Natural Flavors), Peanut Butter (Peanuts, Salt)], Whey Protein, Egg Yolks, Tapioca Maltodextrin, Cellulose Gum, Mono and Diglycerides, Natural Flavor, Guar Gum, Carrageenan, Dextrose, Annatto Color, Vitamin A Palmitate.

I actually take solace in knowing that at the very least there is no high fructose corn syrup on this list, nor artificial flavors or colors.

So yes, there are gums. But there are also gums in Ben & Jerry’s and Breyer’s. And yes, there is a trace amount of partially hydrogenated palm oil. And yes, this is made from conventionally produced milk and cream just like Haagen Dazs.

I think when push comes to shove, the gums infuriate me more than the rBST. So logically Haagen Dazs should be my ice cream of choice. But Mrs. Fussy won’t touch the stuff, it’s far too caloric and fatty for her taste. And I have a real bug up my ass because I can’t get over their claim, “We use only the purest ingredients…to craft the finest ice cream in the world.”

They are close, but they are not there quite yet. So instead, we get the junk. Now you know.