Does Anyone Make Real Ice Cream Anymore???

A friend asked if I could do an article about ice cream vs. frozen yogurt.  I thought this was a great idea, until I started doing some investigating and found out that most frozen yogurts AND ice cream have additives in them.  So much so that I am going to have to write two separate posts! 

I took a trip to the grocery store to find out which ice creams really were the best for you.  This turned out to be a bad idea, because it made me very angry.  There are very few real ice creams made out there made of simple ingredients!  Even Breyers, who I thought made "natural" ice cream, is full of additives, thickeners and gums.  My mom informed me that so much of Breyers is not even real, they now have to call it a "frozen dairy dessert"! 

Let's check a little further:  Here are the ingredients for Breyers "Natural Vanilla" (their purest flavor), which they claim:
America's favorite Vanilla ice cream, made with five simple ingredients including fresh cream, rich milk, fine sugar and real vanilla bean specks. Breyers® Natural Vanilla - inspire your own masterpiece. 

Here are the ingredients:  MILK, CREAM, SUGAR, TARA GUM, NATURAL FLAVOR.

Tara gum is a natural thickener that comes from a plant in Peru.  That's a simple ingredient?  Apparently Breyers added tara gum because consumers wanted a "smoother texture".  And notice how there actually ISN'T vanilla bean in there like they claimed, it's listed as "natural flavor."  If it really was pure vanilla bean, it would say vanilla bean.   And you don't even want to know what is in the other flavors...gums and thickeners galore! 

So which ice creams are the best for you?  Here are the slim pickings I found at the grocery store.

1.  batch  

This is a Boston-based company that is currently only sold in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine and Connecticut.  But I love their philosophy! 

"We are Susie and Veronica, and we make ice cream fully from scratch using real ingredients, many of which are sourced locally and Fair Trade. By real ingredients, we’re talking vanilla beans, cinnamon sticks, and our own handmade caramel, for instance. These are in contrast to the extracts and flavorings used in other ice creams. Additionally, we’re not into putting weird things in our ice cream – things like guar gum, carrageenan, xanthan gum, mono-diglycerides, corn syrup. Somehow it’s become the norm to put those into ice cream."  

Check them out at http://batchicecream.com/

2.   Haagen-Dazs

 

An old favorite from the mall, and always a fun treat when you get an ice cream craving at the food store.  Although Haagen-Dazs has some flavors with a ton of ingredients (like Bananas Foster and Caramel Cone), these simple flavors below are your best bets: 

coffee
vanilla bean (with real ground vanilla beans!)
green tea
chocolate
cookies and cream
chocolate peanut butter
strawberry

3.  Turkey Hill All Natural 

 

Turkey Hill started an all-natural line!  Although limited in flavors, it was great to see a list of very few simple ingredients from one of the big ice cream producers.  Turkey Hill also has the least amount of calories and fat compared to batch and Haagen-Dazs.  The salted caramel is delicious!

Know of any other natural ice creams?  Comment below!

~Healthy Food Detective


P.S.- My friend reminded me that the most natural ice cream you can have is homemade of course!  She is very lucky to have an Kitchenaid mixer with an ice cream attachment.  My mom has her own ice cream maker.  However, I don't have either of these tools.  My next challenge:  to make ice cream without an ice cream maker!  Stay posted!  
 

 Ice Cream's Identity Crisis: The New York Times

The Breyers Controversy