My wife really wanted ice cream this summer, last summer we largely went without because we were eating low fat+low sugar. We got one of those Ninja Creami things and it's been pretty fantastic. Much better than the low cal ice cream options at the store. We can make a pint with between 120 and 300 calories, depending on what we do.
It's almost like a shaved ice machine on steroids, it has an impeller that starts at the top and moves down through the frozen mixture and then back up. It's a knock off of some $5,000 commercial machine. Instead of folding air and fat into the mixture while freezing, you freeze the container and then it completely destroys the ice crystals.
I tend to do a mix of a third cup of 0% yogurt, a tbsp of allulose (fairly expensive sugar substitute so most store products don't use it), a pinch of xantham gum, and then the remainder fruit (cherries, blueberries, mango, peaches, pears). I've also done a can of low sugar canned fruit, xantham gum, allulose, comes out kind of like a sorbet.
My wife does a base using low fat evaporated milk, and she gets a lot fancier (making low sugar mix ins, exotic flavors like coffee bourbon), and those come out much richer. Those are more like 260 calories/pint. It also allows you to taylor the flavor, for example I'm happy with mine much less sweet than grocery store ice creams.
It seemed fairly gimicky, and we avoided it for quite a while because of that, but she found it on sale for $150. Full price is $200, woot had them refurb for $100 last week. Fairly expensive, and noisy as hell, but we use it pretty much daily.
Bump it up a crazy notch. Take that same watermelon, and eat a small slice of feta and basil with it. It's even more mouth watering, and now comes with added protein. This might be my favourite thing on earth - I'm finally off fresh figs.
I saw a video review by Sorted about this back in April[1]. It looks interesting.
I've been seeing the Pacojet (the commercial machine you mentioned) mentioned by various professional chefs for a while now. The Pacojet runs to AUD$10k here.
Wow, thanks for the tip about the Ninja Creami. I've been making ice cream daily for months using just a Nutribullet, but it's a lot of work. I use frozen mango, homemade almond milk, and flax. I don't use any sweeteners - mango is already sweet enough (especially living a sugar free life, my taste buds are more sensitive)
The Creami is definitely easy. My typical run takes me about a minute or two at most to make a pint, and my run is similar to yours (fruit, I use yogurt, allulose to overcome the bitterness of the yogurt). Try using some Xantham gum in yours, just a pinch, it helps keep it creamy. I should try adding flax or hemp hearts, thanks for that tip!
Do you need to blend it first before you put it into the container to be frozen, or can you simply put in the frozen fruit? I was looking into buying one but I wasn't able to figure that part out yet.
Not really. I'll stir it, but not blend it. Say I put in frozen strawberries, yogurt, xantham gum and allulose, I'll then stir it up... So huge chunks of strawberries in a yogurt. When I run it through the Creami, it comes out smooth pink. If I want chunks in it, I'll add fruit after it's done, then put it back in the Creami and push the "mix-in" button, which is a much slower, shorter run.
The main run of the Creami moves this blade down through the frozen mixture, taking ~3 minutes to go down through 4" and back up, so it does it in very small increments. Kind of ultra fine shaved ice plus blending all at the same time.
Right after it comes out of the Creami I'd say it's very similar to ice cream in texture. Depending on how you make it it can be more like soft serve or more like a regular ice cream, or more like a sorbet. After you put it back in the freezer, it gets pretty hard. You can either "respin" it at that point (the top does need to be left flat though, it doesn't handle one side being higher than the other), or I usually just microwave it 20 seconds.
Nice. We have a vitamix blender which is another great approach to making healthy ice cream. Put in some frozen fruit, optionally add a splash of cream or coconut milk, turn it up to max and smash that fruit into the blades with the plunger and you get the creamiest sorbet / sherbet I've ever tasted.
We also have a Vitamix blender with the stick, I'll have to try that sometime. My feeling is it's probably pretty close to the Creami. And the Vitamix is obviously much more versatile, but it's also quite a lot more expensive. Ours is over a decade old though, so I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Vitamix, but is it 4-10x better than a cheaper blender? The answer to that is going to depend on the person. It's a beast though!
Here in New England, we judge a town by how easy it is to get good ice cream (not from the market). We eat it year-round, even when it's snowing. In NH, we pour maple syrup on snow and eat that, also.
Most ice cream is too sweet - vanilla and pistachio are good choices.
Pistachio is the easy way for me to test an icecream store (I'm Italian).
It tells immediately if they are cheap (powder tastes like almond), or they used actual pistachio. The flavor gets better (and more expensive) the more pistachios are used.
So, the only reason why I don't focus on the color is because in Rome there was a special icecream place (only store in a residential area) where they had TWO pistachios flavor and one was quite bright green, it was made of raw pistachios, while the other used roasted pistachios.
Both AMAZING. Since then, I give the benefit of the doubt even with the green color, even though 99% of the time it's disappointing.
The problem with pistachio is that there are a lot of bad pistachio ice creams and gelatos (IMHO). There's really an art to getting it to where it both isn't bitter and isn't too sweet. Ben & Jerry's for example is typically way, way too sweet (in any flavour). There are a couple of exceptions but I can't eat B&J's Pistachio. YMMV.
My particular poison is pistachio of hazelnut gelato. In both cases with correct balance you get something with a nutty, creamy flavour.
It's not something I had until I was an adult so it's not a childhood thing either.
At this point, everything Ben & Jerry's has way to much sugar/corn syrup/whatever.
The point of old school Ben & Jerry's was way too much cream. Apparently, that has gotten too expensive or too perishable for an industrial cold chain.
So years ago there used to be a gelato shop in the West Village called L'Arte del Gelato on the corner of Barrow St and 7th Ave if memory serves. It was right next to the Christopher St subway station and the place would actually shake when the trains went through.
They had an amazing pistachio gelato.
Years ago now the owners had some kind of split. I never knew the details but it resulted in that store changing its name. I honestly forget what to now. It's gone. But the other owner (I guess?) opened a store under the original name in Chelsea Market, which is still there today. I haven't been there in some years but I believe the pistachio gelato is the same. I would definitely recommend trying that.
This might be a case where people genetically taste things differently, because pistachio ice cream wasn't an acquired taste for me at all. Just seems delicious, though maybe a hair off the map of the kind of taste you usually get in ice cream.
Eater is among the highest-quality food publications I’ve found. It’s my go-to restaurant finder when I visit new cities and has so far had a 100% success rate in delivering wonderful experiences – from taco trucks in Baja to fine dining in Denmark to gelato in Italy. It consistently delivers, and it is all due to the sincerity of their editorial team.
We had some freshly made ice cream at the Tillamook Creamery in Oregon: https://www.facebook.com/TillamookCreamery. They get the milk piped into the building. It was so much better fresh.
Yes, at least if you follow the weird requirements to qualify as “ice cream” in the US. The gelatos that Italians usually enjoy do not have enough butterfat to be considered “ice cream” by the USDA. So strictly speaking, people in Italy eat very little “ice cream” because their traditional recipes don’t use enough fat.
Incidentally, this is why places that serve Italian-style ice cream have to explicitly market it as “gelato” and not “ice cream”.
That's funny. Thank you for the explanation. I've come to Canada and people started talking to me about the difference between gelato and icecream. I kept saying "to me there is garbage gelato and good gelato" (I'm Italian), so I had no idea what they were talking about
The confusion is also caused by the fact that in Italy, gelato is always translated in English as "ice cream", but for English speaking people they are different things.
Yeah some quick searches suggest we eat ~3x as much as Italy but it's hard to tell what all is being included in worldatlas.com or whatever
Notably there's also sherbets, frozen custards, soft-serve, frozen yogurt and a shit ton of cheap frozen-dairy-dessert. Not counting the various non-dairy frozen stuff like granita, sorbet, "Italian ice"
Similarly, a lot of the dairy desserts sold by fast food in the U.S. isn't considered ice cream. E.g. nothing sold by Dairy Queen can be called ice cream.
I don’t know, but the cost of a scoop of ice cream in the states is like $4… maybe more. In Amsterdam, you get it everywhere for €1.50 to €2. So, when it is summertime, an ice cream a day is pretty typical consumption. Meaning, it has become more luxury to have ice cream in the states. (Maybe I’m wrong, this is a sense I have, open to correction).
Yeah, I'm still shocked when I want two flavors and they give me those giant balls...
In Italy we have the opposite problem though. Since the scoop size doesn't have a standard, you might find the server in training and get a gelato that's half the size of the one of your friend, which paid half the price
I live in the US and I don't think I've ever paid $4 for a scoop of ice cream in the US, but I haven't bought a scoop in the last two months, so perhaps the recent supply chain/inflation issues have happened.
There is one place I know that charges $4 for what they call a single scoop, but it is about 3x bigger than any scoop elsewhere, and it's a pricey place in general ($8.50 for a malt).
It depends on where you go. It could cost half that if you went to, like, thrifty ice cream instead of what I'm guessing was a Salt and Straw. To say nothing of the men with bells selling icecream all over LA county on a given day...
The grocery store is always going to be cheaper. $4 is the low end of a single scoop in the bay area. And not for some hipster, plant-based organic ice cream either, this is at a regular parlor like Fenton's.
At the Baskin Robbins closet to SF (Daly City) a single scoop is $3.59. After tax that's pretty close to $4 for the most chain-est ice cream I could think of. (The DQ doesn't have photos of their menu on Google maps).
Dairy Queen doesn't serve ice cream. Not being snobbish or pedantic here – soft serve is a separate kind of product. Dairy Queen doesn't call it ice cream (probably because it legally cannot be)
Baskin Robbins is by far the most ubiquitous ice cream chain in the Bay Area and a single scoop is right around $3 as of a few months ago.
I’m not sure why you mention Fenton’s. I’m only aware of a single location in Oakland and I would describe it as fairly high-end. Perhaps not “hip,” but definitely very “retro” stylized. Very Instagramable. Long lines.
Hip places charge like $15 for a cup of ice cream and do weird (but tasty) gastronomy gimmicks like liquid nitrogen freezing or maltodextrin usage. You pay more than $4 at normie chains like coldstone.
Coldstone serves 5-12oz plus toppings made and mixed on-premise. Something like a food truck cup or cone is closer to $2. Baskin Robbins is perhaps $3 for a one scoop cone. But like the other user said, many Americans would rather buy a half gallon or gallon from a grocery store or c-store for $5 and eat too much of it. :)
A pint of ben and jerry's has been $5 for me; going up to $6 during supply chain woes.
A good ice cream shop is more like $5, but the cost scaling is weird and you can normally get like 3x more ice cream for 1.2x cost with larger sizes. The scoops are large. Per volume I think its much more expensive in other countries personally.
You can buy ice cream by the gallon (4.5 litres!!) in the US. It can’t be that expensive! In the UK half a litre (a pint) is considered a lot of ice cream.
You can, but most people don't unless it's for a party or something. Even then, it's almost always by the half gallon (which, of course, isn't actually a full half gallon any more) or pint. The latter becoming more common of late.
In the gallon size that is probably true. Nobody really buys it in that size unless they're feeding a gaggle of children at a birthday party who don't give two shits about how awful the ice cream quality is.
Personally, I prefer my ice cream to have exactly four ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, cocoa. The end. Nothing else. I've had to switch brands a couple times because they cave to pressure to make their chocolate ice cream more creamy. No! I like it a bit dry, it's got cocoa in it! LOL
Not in chocolate ice cream, no. At least, not in the kinds I've liked best. And, I guess, I don't really like eggs in vanilla either. French vanilla just tastes off to me.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that my preferred ice cream style is "philadelphia style"
J.J. McCullough made an informative and entertaining video about the history of American ice cream as well. He makes a lot of videos diving into the history of American (as well as Canadian, as he's Canadian) culture:
Is the ice-cream barge a recent revelation or am I just attuned to seeing references to it? I only learned about it recently and since then it's popped up multiple times.
Given the prevalence of lactose intolerance I think it’s hard to classify ice cream as “the ultimate” comfort food.
When I hear people talking about “comfort food” it’s usually talking about simple (easy to prepare), high-carbohydrate foods with balanced proteins like mac & cheese, spaghetti & meatballs, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc. The stuff you’d feed to children with unsophisticated palettes and an unending desire for calories and protein.
So ice cream isn't the ultimate comfort food because of lactose intolerance but that's a factor in 3 of the 4 other foods you mentioned.
You also say an "unednding desire for calories and protein". *Protein?" Where? Even with metaballs you're not really eating that much meat (aka protein). Did you mean fat?
It's kind of a weird take overall. Ice cream clearly has huge cultural significance in the US as a comfort food.
Ice cream has far, FAR more lactose than most cheeses, especially hard cheeses.
Just a quick look-up online—a 50g serving of ice cream has something like 1.6g lactose. The same amount of cheddar has around 0.05g lactose, and mozarella has around 0.03g. That’s like a factor of 30x-50x.
This explains why even people who don’t think they are lactose intolerant still have digestive problems when they eat ice cream, but have no problems with cheese.
Ice cream may be culturally significant, I just haven’t heard it called a comfort food before.
I’m also a bit confused about the protein comment. Go read the nutritional facts for cheese some time. Cheddar is about 1/4 protein by mass.
If you’re gonna mock me at least get one of your facts straight.
Ice cream has something like 50x as much lactose, by weight, as mozarella cheese. That’s why people who are lactose intolerant often have no problems eating cheeses, or at least certain cheeses in limited quantities. However, even people who think that they’re not lactose intolerant have digestive problems after eating ice cream—it turns out that it’s quite common for people to have some degree of lactose intolerance and be unaware of it.
>Not understanding that cheese generally still has lactose in it, and thus can still be problematic for lactose-intolerant humans.
Turns out the world is full of nuance. But generally speaking, humans with lactose intolerance will have trouble enjoying the consumption of dairy-based products... Including - you guessed it! Cheese!
Certainly, some hard cheeses are lower in lactose. But that which constitutes Mac & Cheese? Oof.
In the US, the most common cheese in mac & cheese has got to be cheddar. Cheddar is low in lactose. “Fancy” mac & cheese might use gruyère instead, which is also often acceptable to people with lactose intolerance.
Also hearty food traditional to the culture(s) you exist in.
When I’m in the UK, bangers and mash. In Central Europe some cutlet and sauerkraut.
This is also because I ate it with my grandparents and they probably enjoyed it from the war when meat was scarce and it was hard to get food from other lands. Like you say, a simpler time.
I've found quite a few good coconut/soy milk based ice-creams in terms of flavour. Once you spend time noticing the texture though (e.g. xanthan gum) they can become unpleasant. That's what ultimately made me stop buying them.
It's almost like a shaved ice machine on steroids, it has an impeller that starts at the top and moves down through the frozen mixture and then back up. It's a knock off of some $5,000 commercial machine. Instead of folding air and fat into the mixture while freezing, you freeze the container and then it completely destroys the ice crystals.
I tend to do a mix of a third cup of 0% yogurt, a tbsp of allulose (fairly expensive sugar substitute so most store products don't use it), a pinch of xantham gum, and then the remainder fruit (cherries, blueberries, mango, peaches, pears). I've also done a can of low sugar canned fruit, xantham gum, allulose, comes out kind of like a sorbet.
My wife does a base using low fat evaporated milk, and she gets a lot fancier (making low sugar mix ins, exotic flavors like coffee bourbon), and those come out much richer. Those are more like 260 calories/pint. It also allows you to taylor the flavor, for example I'm happy with mine much less sweet than grocery store ice creams.
It seemed fairly gimicky, and we avoided it for quite a while because of that, but she found it on sale for $150. Full price is $200, woot had them refurb for $100 last week. Fairly expensive, and noisy as hell, but we use it pretty much daily.