Vanilla--Not Just Plain Anymore

You undoubtedly have a favorite brand of ice cream--and you probably can recite a number of very good reasons why you like it better than all the others.

But if you think you know what vanilla ice cream should taste like, you ought to get a group of them together some day and try tasting them, slowly, one after another. The results can be startling.

I discovered that my favorite brand is far too sweet and that my second favorite brand coated my mouth with fat. And I rediscovered the ice cream of my childhood; to me it still tastes cool and creamy with just the right amount of vanilla. (One of my colleagues, I should mention, thought that this particular ice cream tasted airy and oily.)

The main lesson of this tasting was that everybody has a different opinion about ice cream. Some of us liked the high butterfat super-premiums; some of us thought that they were simply too rich. Some of us liked the ice creams with very little overrun (air whipped into the mixture), and some of us preferred them less dense. All of us, however, identified the flavor of artificial vanilla when it appeared, and none of us liked that very much.

The ice creams we tasted were Haagen-Dazs, Dreyer’s, Breyer’s, Jerseymaid, Westwood, McConnel’s and Thrifty. Overall, Haagen-Dazs seemed to be our favorite; everybody liked it pretty well, and nobody didn’t like it. McConnel’s generated the most controversy; some of us found it the best of the lot and some of us found it the worst.

Personally, I found I really liked Breyer’s, a very white ice cream filled with little black specks of vanilla. This surprised me; Haagen-Dazs is the ice cream I generally eat at home. Although this was a blind tasting, I immediately identified the Haagen-Dazs; it’s so much denser than the other brands that it stands out in a crowd. But I kept finding my spoon straying over to the other ice cream, the airy one with the white black? specks. What was it? I wondered. Why did I like it so much?

The answer, it turned out, was Breyer’s--the ice cream my mother always bought when I was a kid. There are some tastes you just never forget.

Before we began on vanilla ice cream, the tasting panel did a taste-test of vanilla yogurt--Haagen-Dazs, Honey Hill, Dreyer’s, Thrifty, Paradise, Jerseymaid and Kemp’s. On these we were pretty much in agreement--all of them tasted more like ice cream than yogurt, and most of them were pretty dreadful. We all favored Haagen-Dazs and Honey Hill over the other brands, although I was startled to discover that I much preferred the Honey Hill to any of the other brands. I thought it had a fresh, sweet natural flavor.