Review: Avalon Dairy Certified Organic "Mocha Fudge" Ice Cream

Those readers who are in BC know that things are tense right now between BC public school teachers and the provincial government. Without getting political, we at Two Girls, One Scoop would just like to say that we love teachers. And so we would like to dedicate this review to the teachers in our lives (and there are a LOT).

But which flavour to choose to reflect the educators we know? Sure, we could go traditional and do something apple-related, but when was the last time any kid put an apple on a teacher's desk? Finally, we realized that most teachers would not be able to get through all their lessons, prep, marking, and extra-curriculars without coffee. And so we present to you, teachers and non-teachers alike, this review of Avalon Dairy's Certified Organic Mocha Fudge ice cream!

For British Columbians, especially those in the south, Avalon Dairy has been a mainstay for over 100 years. They take a very traditional approach and still package and deliver their milk in glass bottles. While they take dairy products seriously, milk is their big seller and their ice cream is distinctly hard to find. I was lucky enough to find a very small selection of their ice creams at the local Fairway Market, and snagged the last Mocha Fudge.

After reading through the ingredients, I can confirm that everything in this ice cream is indeed certified organic, so for those of you that take organics seriously, this may be an option to pursue (particularly since a lot of the organic frozen desserts around here tend to be non-dairy). This product also calls itself "premium ice cream" and carries a price tag to match: a whopping $9.99!! Will it live up to the quality implied by both the label and price?

The flavour of the ice cream itself is a well-balanced coffee flavour that is neither too strong nor too sweet, and tastes natural. I was expecting the ice cream to have both coffee and chocolate flavours, as mocha would normally have, but it seems they are kept separate in this case. The fudge swirl is also a good level of sweetness, but it has that sort of flat, syrupy taste that you often find in chocolate soy frozen desserts. It's not bad, but it's not that great either. Kind of meh. I feel like the coffee would have stood up well on its own.

While the flavour is fine, the texture of this particular pint was not pleasant. Again, like a non-dairy dessert or a low-fat ice cream, this has a very crystallized consistency. Now, there could be several reasons for this, and I tend to believe that, because of the price tag and lack of a big brand name, this container may have sat around in the grocery store freezer for a LONG time, probably near the door, which is continually getting opened, thus messing with the consistency of the temperature. This may have led to the crystallization of water within the ice cream. However, you would think that a "premium" ice cream such as this would have a high enough fat content that this could be avoided for a most part. Overall, the texture made this experience a bit of a disappointment.

Recommend to a friend? If the texture was improved, and if you are a die-hard organic food purchaser, this might be something to consider?

Repurchase? No - the price tag was too rich, and the product not rich enough.

Review: So Delicious “Cookie Dough” Coconut Milk Frozen Dessert

For us lactose intolerant folk, sometimes the options in terms of dairy-free frozen treats feel a bit limited. I love sorbets and dairy-free gelatos, but they tend to be expensive and are often hard to find and limited in flavour variety. Soy or tofu based frozen desserts can be OK, but they can also be absolutely awful, and it's hard to get a texture that isn't rock hard when you're using soy. So I was excited to learn from a friend, who is also lactose intolerant, that there are now ice cream-like frozen desserts made from coconut milk. This is a great option for people, like me, who don't like soy because of how it can affect your body's estrogen production or because of an allergy (although coconut is also a common allergen). I am a big coconut fan to begin with, so I was excited to try these out!

When J and I made our last venture into Fairway Market and finally found the Island Farms Green Tea flavour, we also found two brands (!) of coconut milk ice cream for sale (OK, it's not really ice cream, but it's a lot easier to type). The first was Luna and Larry's, and the second was So Delicious, a company that is more well known for making soy beverages and soy ice creams. While I'm sure we will go back and review a Luna and Larry's flavour in the future, the So Delicious brand was less expensive at the time of purchase, so we opted for that. There were several flavours available, including a coconut one. While we thought it would probably be safe to go with the coconut flavour, considering what it's made of, we wanted to be able to compare this to a regular dairy-based ice cream, so we chose a common ice cream-like flavour, one that we have already reviewed from different brands: cookie dough. According to the company's website, this flavour is also gluten free.

Apparently this is the "old" packaging, but the product should be the same.

For this review we are joined once again by AG, who was a big help to us in our review of Island Farms Green Tea. This ice cream is coconut milk based with large pieces of cookie dough and chocolate chunks throughout. It was quite easy to scoop out, and we didn't have the frozen solid cookie dough problem that we had with Ben and Jerry's, despite the size of the pieces.

We were impressed by the cookie dough right off the bat. Not only were they in big chunks, but there were little mini chocolate chips in it. This seemed like the kind of stuff you could actually bake cookies out of, and while we debated trying it, by the time we had gotten around to making any kind of decision...we had already finished the ice cream. We also appreciated that the cookie dough wasn't too sweet, letting the chocolate chunks and the ice cream carry the sugar in this dessert. The chocolate was somewhat crispy, sweet but not too sweet, and So Delicious was very generous in the amount of mix-ins they gave us, unlike some of the brands of traditional cookie dough ice cream we tried.

And now the part you are probably wondering about: the ice cream base. Well if you expected that it would taste like coconut....you would be correct. And the coconut and ice cream combination takes some getting used to. At times we were almost getting like a marzipan flavour coming through. When you eat it together with the cookie dough, the coconut flavour becomes a bit less evident, but when you get it on its own you're reminded that, oh yea, you're eating a coconut milk ice cream. The ice cream is also quite sweet, but again this kind of balances with the less sweet cookie dough. AG commented that the ice cream base “tastes more like body lotion than ice cream,” and it does kind of give me flashbacks to The Body Shop's Coconut Body Butter. The coconut milk taste + cookie dough is not a bad combination, it's just kind of weird, and we're not sure that it totally works, at least not in the way we expected it to.

Recommend to a friend? If you're lactose intolerant, you should try this. While the combination is unconventional, it is still enjoyable and a nice alternative to soy-based frozen desserts. We give So Delicious serious props for the quality of the product and their generosity with the mix-ins.

Repurchase? We'd like to try some of the other coconut milk ice cream varieties rather than repurchase this particular one. It was OK, but not really our thing.

Review: Island Farms "Green Tea" Ice Cream

Today's review comes with the help of one of our classmates who helped us out with a couple of tastings, and since she is half Filipino (let's call her Asian Girl...AG for short), perhaps it's appropriate that we review one of Island Farms' Asian-inspired classic flavours, Green Tea ice cream. ;)

It occurred to me after I recycled the container that this photo doesn't actually show the flavour. Fail.

Now, we recently reviewed Haagen Dazs's take on green tea and we were somewhat disappointed by the subtlety of its green tea flavour. That is to say, we could barely taste the tea underneath the vanilla. So naturally we're curious to see how this one compares. The most obvious difference, when we removed the lid, is the colour. Unlike the washed out colour of Haagen Dazs, this thing is like...electric green. Not quite glow in the dark, and this picture doesn't do it justice, but it is green. Definitely looks like matcha powder, so if this stuff doesn't pack some serious green tea punch, something is wrong. (It's worth noting that on subsequent openings of the container, the ice cream had browned a bit in colour...which I think is actually good because it suggests that the colour is due to organic elements, not food dye)

Well, it's definitely matcha. AG commented that it tastes more like a Booster Juice matcha shot than actual ice cream, and added that her desire to try a "weird" flavour with us had been fulfilled by this product because it was totally weird. It does have a very strong tea flavour, so if you were hoping to be gently eased into the realm of green tea you'll be in for a bit of a shock; it's the complete other end of the spectrum from the Haagen Dazs we tried. While AG thought it was disgusting, finding it too earthy and that it "tastes like a face mask," J loved it, proclaiming that it is the only ice cream she has had that can truly call itself "green tea" because it actually has real green tea flavour. To her, if you don't like this ice cream, you probably don't like real green tea much.

As for me, I'm kind of neutral on it. The flavour is good, but I only really enjoy it for the first few bites before I get turned off. I think the issue is actually less about the taste and more about the mouth feel of this stuff. To me, it's too high fat, too creamy, for a tea ice cream. Creamy richness goes well with coffee flavours, but I feel like it's way too much for tea. I like green tea a lot, but I'm not sure it fits with a full fat ice cream like this. It's weird because I didn't feel this way about the Haagen Dazs one, but maybe that's because the dominant flavour there wasn't actually green tea.

However...

 When I was trying to finish off the rest of the container, I mixed this ice cream with some 1% milk in the blender to make a green tea milkshake. By diluting the flavour somewhat, as well as the fat content, this product was much more enjoyable. So if you're looking to make like a green tea smoothie/milkshake, this ice cream plus a low fat milk makes a pretty tasty concoction.

 Recommend to a friend? If you really like green tea, you may be a fan of this Island Farms endeavour. But you really have to like it.
Repurchase? J: Yes B: No, wouldn't be worth it for me.

Review: Ben and Jerry's "If I Had 1,000,000 Flavours" Ice Cream

As proud Canadians, we were excited to get our hands on this creation by Ben and Jerry's: If I Had 1,000,000 Flavours. Note the "u" in "flavours"! This is one of several Ben and Jerry's ice creams based on songs or bands, and is inspired by the Barenaked Ladies song "If I Had A Million Dollars". True, BNL has had some scandal over the past couple of years, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the song that still frequents the muzak of grocery stores everywhere. Especially when it comes in ice cream form.

Disappointingly, this ice cream does not literally contain 1,000,00 flavours, but I supposed that would have been extremely hard to fit into one carton. It's a "collision of chocolate & vanilla ice creams mixed with chocolate-covered toffee, white chocolate chunks, peanut butter cups, and chocolate-covered almonds." It's 999,994 flavours short of a million, but it still sounds delicious and does give more variety than the average pint.

We divided the cartoon between us and dug in to see just how many flavours we could find. There was a fairly even distribution of chocolate and vanilla ice creams, and the chocolate was quite nice. The vanilla tasted OK but it had this weird gritty texture to it. I didn't notice it at first, but once J called my attention to it, it was pretty hard to ignore. It wasn't ice crystals or mix-ins. It was almost...dusty feeling and not at all pleasant. And it was only present in the vanilla for some reason.

In the battle of penny VS peanut butter cup, the peanut butter cup takes home the prize!

As for the mix-ins, Ben and Jerry's did not skimp, especially on the peanut butter cups. Those suckers were HUGE. The white chocolate chunks were also a decent size, and while we found very few chocolate-covered almonds, they were a nice size. J swears she found a chocolate covered peanut in hers, not something listed in the ingredients. However, neither of us were able to find any toffee in either of our bowls. Overall, we felt like the distribution was more like "If I Had 1,000,000 Peanut Butter Cups" than "1,000,000 Flavours".

Our overall feeling on this flavour is that is was good but it felt more like variations on the theme of chocolate, rather than the true mix that is suggested by the name. We love peanut butter cups, and chocolate, but would have loved even more the addition of something like cookie pieces, caramel, nuts, coconut... And the dusty, gritty texture of the vanilla was really hard to ignore. Perhaps having a more even distribution of mix-ins would've made this a more exciting experience (and actually having some toffee would have been nice!)

There is also a nice article written about the band's reaction to the release of this flavour.

Recommend to a friend? Yes, especially if you consider yourself to be a chocoholic. We think that the texture issue with the vanilla was a freak occurrence, but if it was not, then we would be much more hesitant to recommend this.
Repurchase? J: If the texture of the vanilla was improved, yes. B: Since this ice cream was so much about the peanut butter cups, at least in our pint, I would be inclined to get Island Farms "Moose Tracks" instead and get more ice cream for my money.