www.davidrosengarten.com

June 2002

I SCREAM!!! ...AND SO SHOULD YOU, FOR 10 MIND-BOGGLING AMERICAN ICE CREAMS

It's no secret that Americans are ga-ga for ice cream. And this abiding passion has led to a modern explosion of ice creams in the U.S., a cornucopia of craved cream unmarched in quantity and variety anywhere else in the world. However-as with so many other products-the field in America is dominated by the Big Brands, the big players, those labels, like Breyer's, that can be found for a very reasonable price in virtually any supermarket in the U.S.; these are the ice creams that most Americans consume. Fighting a rearguard action for years have been Smaller Brands, like Ben & Jerry's- still national but more artisanal, more expensive, and positioned as having higher quality. Lastly, America is rife in every region with producers of ice cream who are smaller still, many of them extremely local, who purporr to bring an even more hand-crafted, old-fashioned touch to their products.

Having options mean making decisions-and before I made mine this ice-cream-eating season, I wanted to know the answers to these questions:

* Does the supermarket product stack up? Given its good value, and ease of finding it, should I stick with it, and abandon my plans to spend more money and go to more acquisition trouble?

* Are the larger "upscale" producers- like Ben & Jerry's, like Haagan-Dazs-really better than the inexpensive supermarket brands? Could you tell the difference in a blind tasting? Are they worth the extra price? Are they among the best in America?

* Are there smaller, less well-known producers out there who make demonstrably better ice cream? Are they worth the extra price? Do their products ship well?

To answer these questions, I recently set up a huge tasting of ice creams that are available across America. I did not taste everything that's out there; I don't think any one person could. But here's what I tried to include in my tasting: 1) Every ice cream that has national distribution in supermarkets (if the ice cream is in most states, but not all, I allowed it in): and 2) Every small-production ice cream that can be shipped to your door (there are some great ice creams out there, unfortunately, that don't ship and are only available in the areas in which they're made.)

To simplify matters, I asked each producer that met the above criteria to send me 5 ice creams: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry (to cover the basics), and two other flavors that helped make the reputation of the company (producers choice.)

I received approximately 300 different ice creams. As I tasted through them all, I kept track, of course, of the ones that blew me away. To earn a place on the following list, an ice cream producer had to blow me away with 5 of the 5, or 4 of the 5, or 3 of the 5, or 2 of the 5, or even 1 of the 5. As long as something blew me away, I wanted to tell you about it. Please read the notes carefully for each entry, because I will also tell you the general characteristics I found in each producer's ice cream, and whether or not I think a producer makes consistently high-level ice cream.

I've constructed the following list in what I perceive as descending order of frozen ecstasy. Please note: the list covers only the relatively expensive premium ice creams I tasted; non-premium, inexpensive, nationally available branded are discussed on p. 4. How expensive is "relatively expensive?" The average in this group is around 3 bucks per pint. Specific prices are tricky to tell, because the price of any one ice cream can vary a great deal across the country. But if an ice cream is usually above or below the $3 line, I'll let you know.

One further note: the producers of some of the greatest ice creams in my tasting do not ship. However, they landed in this list because they do business with a great company in Wisconsin called icecreamsource.com (see sidebar for info) which will ship these small-production ice creams to you! If any ice cream producer in the following list makes its ice creams available to you through icecreamsource.com, you will see an asterisk next to this listing. If there's no asterisk, you can get the ice cream either at a local store, or by having the company ship it to you.

BLEW-RIBBON ICE CREAM: THE TEN THAT BLEW ME AWAY

#1 *CRÉME CRÉMAILLÈRE (BEDFORD, NY) Made in the kitchen of La Cremaillere-one of the loveliest French restaurants in in the wealthy outer reaches of the New York City area-eggy Creme Cremaillere ice cream is astonishing. I got to taste only the mainline 3 flavors, but the alone flipped me out. Fe Fraises des Bois-first reviewed in The Rosengarten Report issue #4- may well be the greatest strawberry ice cream in the country; the taste of wild strawberries is absurdly intense, and wild streak of acidity keeps everything fabulously refreshing. Not a cream bomb, but a strawberry bomb. The Choco Chocolat, on the other hand, is a chocolate bomb, a choco-fantic's dream cream. It was the darkest-colored ice cream in my tasting, looking almost like fudge; it was also among the most chocolate-intense of the tasting, with the kinds of flavors chocolate freaks describe as "fruity" and "winey". The Vanille Maison, with scads of little black flecks, is clearly the serious-vanilla kind of vanilla ice cream; it's excellent, but I prefer a little more focus on the cream. All of the ice creams are low-moderate in sweetness (the vanilla's the sweetest), and all have an amazing texture that is simultaneously rich and elegant, creamy but not cloying. Bravo!