Snack Review: Edy’s Slow Churned Neapolitan Ice Cream
I don’t usually bother with low fat ice cream. I’d rather just eat a smaller portion less often of something that’s actually good.
I decided to try this anyway because it got a good review in Consumer Reports. I am ambivalent about the food reviews in Consumer Reports. On the one hand, they seem to be quite systematic and to have some idea of what they’re talking about. On the other hand, you turn the page and there’s an article telling you that when you grill food, you should wrap it in foil and make sure it doesn’t get any charred parts because they are bad for you. Hello, CR, did you ever notice that the tasty charred parts are the only conceivable reason to grill something instead of cooking it in a convenient indoor kitchen??
Anyway, the chocolate flavor was rated “very good” and described as “No flaws; typical chocolate ice cream.” Not exactly a rave, but, hey, I’d be thrilled if someone told me I had no flaws, right?
My Safeway was out of chocolate, but I figured that this Neapolitan would let me taste three flavors at once, so what’s the downside?
Well, the downside is - I like the chocolate, but the vanilla is not great: it was only rated “good” by CR, so maybe they do know what they’re talking about – and, unfortunately, there seems to be an uneven amount of the different flavors in the container, with the vanilla predominating.
But, the chocolate is pretty good and so is the strawberry. It really is your typical chocolate ice cream – the old fashioned kind, not the ultra-high-premium high-fat heart-attack-in-a-bowl type that we’ve all come to know and love. It tastes like chocolate milk, not like it’s striving to taste like a bar of dark chocolate, and it’s soft enough that it’s not hard work to get a spoon into it when you take it out of the freezer. I’ll bet it would have made a fantastic milkshake, if I’d thought of that before it was all gone. It’s exactly the right kind of ice cream for that kind of thing.
As for the other flavors, I realized that I haven’t had strawberry ice cream in a long time - isn’t it supposed to have little speckles in it? This didn’t. It didn’t taste like fresh strawberries, more like strawberry jam, but, hey, there is nothing wrong with strawberry jam. About the vanilla, well, despite the fact that vanilla ice cream looks like cream with nothing added, vanilla actually should be a flavor, not a lack of flavor, but delicate enough that you should be able to taste the dairy. This mostly just tasted like sweet. But, two out of three ain’t bad.
By the way, I really don’t mean to be the Snack Curmudgeon here, always yelling at these newfangled junk foods to get off of my lawn! But when did ‘churn’ become some kind of code word for low calorie/low fat ice cream? Edy’s has this ‘slow churned’ line and Breyer’s is called ‘double churned.’ Can someone please tell them that ALL ice cream is churned? And, the slower you churn it, the less air gets whipped in, so wouldn’t each portion have MORE fat if it was slow churned? It doesn’t make any sense, marketing people. Stop trying to make words mean things that they don’t and just call it lower calorie ice cream, OK?
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