Review: The Udder Guy's "Wild Blackberry" Ice Cream

Back when we tried The Udder Guy's Roasted Coconut flavour, we were so impressed that we couldn't wait to sample another one of these locally-made concoctions. But what to choose? I was leaning heavily toward the coffee flavour, but J and I decided to go for the Wild Blackberry flavour, as it seems even more local, and at the time of our tasting the last blackberries were still just barely pickable (and J made sure to sample them from the bush by our driveway whenever she had the opportunity).

That little anecdote should give you some idea of how long ago we actually tested this ice cream! OK, so this review has been many months in the making, and the blackberry bushes now would be lucky to even have any leaves on them, but time has not altered out opinion of this Cowichan Bay product!

Do not adjust your monitor! Yes, this is exactly how pale this ice cream was: almost grey. We were really hoping for a bit more colour, to give this ice cream a real punch, but it looks about as exciting as the DMV. The colour problem is really due to not enough fruit, and unfortunately this problem persisted to the flavour of the ice cream as well.

The Udder Guy, we are disappointed! When we read "Wild Blackberry" on the label, we expected to find more than one or two in our bowls! Yes, fruit is expensive, and wild blackberries, or blackberries or any variety really, would be difficult to procure in bulk. But this ice cream also carries a premium price tag, and one expects a flavour to match. Instead we got a flavour that actually tasted more like blueberry than blackberry. And even then, it was more like "blueberry flavour" than actual blueberries. If you've ever gotten Special K blueberry flavour, or had granola with little dried blueberries in it....that is what this tastes like. Again, we were really disappointed.

In order to compete with brands like Haagen Dazs - which it does in this market, as it shares a similar container size and price - the quality has to be the same, if not better. The Roasted Coconut flavour was bomb, but this really falls flat. Rather than capturing the essence of Vancouver Island blackberries, this product, in both colour and flavour, makes you feel more like you're eating blueberry wallpaper paste.

Recommend to a friend? Not sure who would enjoy this. Maybe people who like really bland things...
Repurchase? No

Review: Island Farms "Original Moose Tracks" Ice Cream

After all this time we're super behind on reviews and the queue of products seems to be a mile long. However, I feel that it's about time 2G1S did a review of one of my favourites: Islands Farms Original Moose Tracks Ice Cream.

It's no secret that I love this stuff. As you may have gathered from the reviews of Lucerne's Nuttin' Better and Haagen Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter, I kind of like peanut butter and chocolate. A lot. A lot. And this product is the beginning of my love affair with that combo in ice cream form. Now, Moose Tracks is not an Island Farms creation by any means, but here in BC, it is marketed under this brand. And there are now a boatload of different Moose Tracks varieties and flavours to choose from. However, the original will always be my favourite: awesome in its purest form.

This product consists of "vanilla flavoured ice cream with peanut butter cups and famous Moose Tracks fudge".  In my most recent carton, some of the fudge was overblended with the ice cream in places, resulting in spots that looked like they contained chocolate ice cream as well (as you can see in the photo). The fudge ribbon (for lack of a better term) is richly chocolatey and sweet (but not overpowering), melts easily in your mouth, and it is balanced well by the vanilla. The peanut butter cups are small, but there is a generous distribution of them, so the peanut butter flavour is never lacking. Overall, this is a well-done, tried-and-true variation on the peanut butter and chocolate theme that never fails to please in this neck of the woods!


Recommend to a friend? Absolutely
Repurchase? Of course - this will always be a delicious standby

Review: Purely Decadent "Chocolate Obsession" Lactose Free Frozen Dessert

Man, I gotta say... even with Lactaid, dairy is just not my best friend. Which is really unfortunate, since it's in so many things I love. Seriously, how could I go without cheese, or yogurt, or (duh) ice cream?! Thanks goodness this isn't a full-blown allergy, or I would be pulling my hair out! In any case, in order to scale back on my dairy intake a bit I decided to give Purely Decadent's Chocolate Obsession Lactose Free Frozen Dessert a try.

First things first: this name is somewhat misleading. I have had my eyes on Chapman's Lactose-Free line for a while now (only holding off because of the artificial sweeteners), and those products are actual ice cream with lactase enzyme added so that the dairy is digestible. So this is kind of what I was expecting from this Purely Decadent product. But nope. It's soy. It says soy NOWHERE on the front, and while it's true that it is lactose free, to me the labeling implies something different from what it delivers. Then again, my bad for not actually checking the ingredients list before I bought this.

Since we're talking ingredients, it is worth noting that a lot of the ingredients in this product are certified organic, so if that kind of thing is important to you, this might be worth checking out. The company describes this frozen dessert as "chocolate non-dairy frozen dessert with a thick ribbon of chocolate sauce, riddled with crispy chocolate flakes" - again with the avoiding of the word "soy"! Why, guys?! Just say it! Be proud! In any case, I'd have to say that this description is fairly accurate. Though the chocolate sauce kind of showed up in pockets rather than in a true ribbon, it did provide an extra burst of sweetness that set itself apart from the actual frozen dessert base. The chocolate flakes were definitely crispy. And I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of them. Because they were so brittle, as opposed to kind of melt-in-your-mouth, they broke up quite easily and made it feel almost like I was eating dirt at times. Again, this was the texture, not the taste, but it wasn't really the most pleasant experience. I suppose the colour didn't help with this association.

So what is my overall opinion on this product? It's OK. If I were a real chocoholic, I think I would scoff at Purely Decadent's name choice for this, as it doesn't scream "obsession" to me on any level. The "ice cream" base tastes like your typical chocolate soy product, which isn't bad, but it's not fabulous either. The sauce was a nice touch, but it too falls a bit flat. The flakes I could probably do without. This dessert was alright, but it didn't do anything new or progressive and I certainly wouldn't call it "decadent".

Recommend to a friend? This product is OK, but I feel like you could probably do better, especially for the price.
Repurchase? Nah

Review: Mario's Lemon Sorbetto

Being a big fan of citrus flavours, I was excited to try out this lemon sorbet by Mario's, a company that is known for making sorbets and gelatos in the “Italian tradition”. We had already seen some lemon in President's Choice Pink Lemonade ice cream, but this is a chance to try a dairy-free option that is much more juice-based.

The colour of this product is essentially pure white, which suggests an absence of artificial colours. The texture is somewhat similar to the Dorgel gelato we sampled a while back, in that it isn't smooth and creamy but instead more like compacted snow or, more accurately, like a popsicle. Nonetheless, I had little trouble scooping it out for the taste test.

What you will really notice about this flavour is that it is REALLY all about the lemon. It is sweet enough to be enjoyable, but there is a definite tartness and acidity that is ALMOST too much. The flavour is really authentic (as it should be, given the ingredients) and if you like lemon you will appreciate this, but if you don't handle sour things well or you have a sensitive stomach, the acid may be a bit overwhelming. I really enjoyed this flavour, as it was really clean, fresh, and natural, and it had an overall sort of lightness that would make it a great pairing for fruit desserts or to enjoy on its own when you aren't looking for something rich.

Recommend to a friend? If you're a lemon lover, this one will be right up your alley.

Repurchase? Yes

Review: Purdy's "Hedgehog" Ice Cream

If you like to browse entries by "labels" or "tags", or if you ever wondered where you can find these products for yourself, you will be pleased to know that we have added tags to all of our entries showing where we purchased the ice creams. Sometimes the point of purchase is due to a sale or discount, proximity, or lack of availability at other stores - we are not affiliated with any of the grocery stores where we buy ice cream. Some of the products are available at multiple grocery chains - we are simply letting you know where we found them so that you might be able to find them on your own.

As big fans of Purdy's chocolates, we were excited to try their line of ice creams available in BC grocery stores, produced by Island Farms. The flavours include milk chocolate, sweet georgia browns, mint meltie, peanut butter, and hedgehog, the flavour we decided to sample. Not only do we like chocolate hedgehogs, but J used to own a couple of hedgehogs as pets (and was quite excited about them).

This is a simple ice cream. It doesn't waste time with mix-ins or textural variations. This stuff is exactly what it proclaims to be: hedgehog ice cream. It tastes just like hedgehog chocolate filling in frozen form. It's an extremely rich mix of milk chocolate and hazelnut, with a very smooth, almost "thick" texture. There isn't much more to say: this taste isn't just a good tribute, it's exactly like the real thing. It just needs to be in small servings since, like we said, it's very, very rich.

Recommend to a friend? If you like hedgehogs, you will love this ice cream. It's like eating a hedgehog chocolate.
Repurchase? J + B: Absolutely, especially for times when we have a real chocolate craving.

Review: The Udder Guy's "Roasted Coconut" Ice Cream

Today we bring you a review of an ice cream we actually had to purchase twice because somebody decided to eat half of the container without taking any photos. These things happen when you're dead tired and crave ice cream. Especially when that ice cream is The Udder Guy's Roasted Coconut, made by a local company that operates out of Cowichan Bay, Vancouver Island.

You know an ice cream manufacturer is grassroots when they don't have different cartons for each flavour. And the carton design looks like it might have been a high school art project. And the flavour is put on the rim of the lid on a sticker. And it's written in Comic Sans MS (my least favourite font of all time). But we'll try not to hold it against them. After all, it's what's inside that counts.

Hard to tell much from this photo, but basically what we have is a yellowy-white ice cream with bits of shredded and roasted coconut throughout (and not in skimpy amounts either). According to The Udder Guy's website, "We husk, shred and roast all our own coconut to avoid commercial shredded coconut, which often contains sodium meta-bisulphate, the most highly regulated additive in Canada. This product is banned in many parts of the world. (It is used to clean equipment in brewing companies.)" We don't really know if this is actually a common concern with commercially available shredded coconut, but if someone is willing to do that much work with their own coconuts, we're willing to take their word for it. It's times like this that I wish I had paid better attention in that food science class... 

So is the taste of this flavour enough to make us willing to overlook the less-than-flashy carton design? Heck yes it is!

This ice cream is smooth and creamy and doesn't feel or taste like it has a ton of chemicals in it, which is refreshing. The ice cream base has a nice, sweet coconut flavour to it that isn't TOO sweet or overpowering. It reminds me a bit of coconut extract rather than eating actual coconut. The coconut shreds are well toasted so the flavour really comes out, and you can tell that, unlike a lot of commercially available shredded coconut, it is not sweetened. Which is nice, because the sweetness of the ice cream itself is sufficient. We both really, really liked it. What this ice cream really tastes like is MORE, which definitely made having to purchase it twice easy to swallow!

Recommend to a friend? Definitely. This would pair well with a variety of desserts, and unless you hate coconut, you will probably love this. Don't shy away from the basic-looking carton: this stuff is dynamite!
Repurchase? J + B: Already have, and would again. Can't wait to try the other flavours by this local company!

Review: Breyers "Smooth & Dreamy Vanilla Baked Apple"

Today's review is for Breyers "Smooth & Dreamy Vanilla Baked Apple," just one of the flavours in their line of light ice creams that claim to be "1/2 the fat of regular ice cream" due to the use of some fancy-pants cream press system (whatever that means). Not sure if I buy the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, but the nutrition information shows that this ice cream is indeed lower in fat than regular ice cream: in fact, while our previously reviewed Island Farm Black Forest Cake ice cream has 15% of your daily recommended fat intake per 1/2 cup serving, Vanilla Baked Apple has only 5%, so 1/3 the fat of this particular regular ice cream. Not bad!

Also of note is that it is actually labelled as "ice cream", which means it has the ingredients to qualify for such a label. This is important because more than once I have been careless in my reading of the package and have ended up buying "frozen dessert" products which, compared to ice cream, can be just plain nasty and full of plant oils.

I know when I dream, I dream of Breyers

My last experience with Breyers was rather unpleasant (it was one of those "frozen dessert" scenarios that we ended up washing down the sink) so I would normally be hesitant to try another one of their products. However, since the label clearly says "ice cream" and because vanilla baked apple sounds kind of awesome, we decided to give it a go. Let's open 'er up and take a look at what we're working with.

Holy freezer catastrophe, batman! Yes, this is what it looked like when we opened it! Ack! Either the consistency of the swirl in the ice cream wasn't substantial enough to hold up to being frozen, or somewhere along the line this thing got thawed and refrozen. Or something else that would compromise it. I remember working for a grocery store that will remain unnamed where pallets of ice cream were left outside the freezer for up to an hour at a time, and you have to think that this sort of thing might affect the product.

But not to be put out, we decided to try it anyway, even though it looked ugly as heck. There are some nice vanilla bean specks in the ice cream portion, and the baked apple swirl looks well proportioned so as not to be either overpowering or underwhelming, so despite the freezer damage, once scooped it looked promising.

By now, J and I have both sampled this ice cream more than once in our quest to finish off the carton and make room in the freezer for future purchases, and I think I can safely say that we still don't really know what to think of this flavour. I guess we can start with the positives.

Even though this is a "light" ice cream, it doesn't appear to have any artificial or synthetic sugars, like Splenda or aspartame. While these can be great for diabetics, I find they leave a really nasty aftertaste that I just can't ignore. It also has a really nice texture for not being full fat. Sometimes low fat ice creams will be extremely hard or almost granulated, and this was definitely neither of these things.

But the taste... There is something weird about it, and we just can't figure out whether it's coming from the vanilla ice cream or the baked apple swirl. You know how I mentioned artificial sugars and the weird aftertaste? Well even though this thing doesn't have those notorious offenders, it kind of tastes like it does. There is something chemically-tasting in there that just doesn't sit well. It's not like it tastes bad but it's not great either.

The vanilla ice cream part is pretty standard (is the chemically taste coming from here?) and as stated before, the texture doesn't scream diet product, which is a good thing. The baked apple swirl (or is this the offending party?) is a bit caramel-y but you can also taste some tartness, presumably from the dried apple flakes cited in the ingredients. Seriously, if it wasn't explicitly in the ingredients, I would've assumed there were no actual apples in this product, as they are more like bits of apple dust than fruit. We shared some with my parents this afternoon, and while my father said he thought the flavour was overpowered by cinnamon, the rest of us couldn't actually taste any cinnamon at all. Weird. Both my parents thought the flavour was pretty awful, and we both decided that the more we ate, the less we liked the taste.

What really hurts this ice cream, in our opinion, was the lack of texture. While the texture of the actual ice cream part was nice and creamy, the fact that the swirl was, if anything, slightly gritty in texture was pretty disappointing. It would have been a huge improvement if there had been any discernible apple pieces or chunks in there, like an apple strudel filling or something similar. But no, instead we get drippy caramel-like substance and apple dust. Fabulous.

So what's the final verdict?

Recommend to a friend? What we would actually recommend is to get a nice apple pie and top it with a low fat (or if you're not concerned about calories, full fat) vanilla ice cream scoop. As far as imitations go, this one just doesn't cut it.
Repurchase? J: Maybe one more time if it was in better condition to re-evaluate it. B: No thanks, I'll pass.

Review: Island Farms "Country Cream: Black Forest Cake"

J was at Thrifty Foods the other day and managed to snag a container of Island Farms' Country Cream Black Forest Cake ice cream (one of the other "Country Cream" flavours is Peanut Brittle, which we have been trying to find without much success!). Since we both enjoy black forest cake in its non-ice cream form, this sounded like it might be worth a try.

Island Farms describes this creation as "Rich chocolate ice cream swirled with chewy brownie bits, black cherries, and cherry ribbon, all swirled with French vanilla ice cream." Sounds good enough: the chocolate cake and cherries should be well represented, with the vanilla ice cream standing in for the standard whipped cream. Let's take a look at what was inside.

Hmm. Definitely lots of chocolate ice cream, and you can see some evidence of cherry pieces (which were a nice, dark, natural colour, rather than the radioactive red colour of the maraschino cherries you'd normally find in a real black forest cake). The vanilla ice cream swirl is small (and it didn't get any more substantial further down), but we understand that chocolate is the main player here. Alrighty.

 Wait. Wait, wait wait. Wasn't there supposed to be a cherry ribbon? It's clearly there in the picture on the carton, lookin' all oozy and junk. But no matter how far down into the carton we got, no ribbon ever emerged. Just look for yourself!

So what does this sucker taste like? Well, the answer is mostly like chocolate ice cream with cherry "accents" and aftertaste. Rather than a conversation between chocolate and cherry, it's more like chocolate composed an epic poem and cherry wrote a text message. Maybe that missing cherry ribbon was too thoroughly mixed in and got completely drowned by the chocolate, and all we can taste are its feeble cries for help.

The brownie pieces, our reminder that this is black forest cake, and not just chocolate-cherry, are reasonably distributed throughout the ice cream, and they have a nice chewy texture and fudgey taste. We were impressed by the cherries. As stated before, they are black cherries, not maraschino cherries, and while they taste a bit like their bright red counterparts, they are definitely not the candied variety. They were nice and juicy and we felt like we were eating real fruit, something that cannot always be said about what you'd find in a black forest cake. The only problem is that there weren't enough of them. We found more brownie pieces than cherries, and since the cherry ribbon was already AWOL, it would have been nice to have a stronger cherry component to this ice cream.

What really confused us in this flavour was the vanilla ice cream swirl. Clearly it was there to represent the whipped cream you'd find on the real cake, but because it was small in proportion to the chocolate ice cream, it got completely lost. All we could taste was chocolate, with the vanilla not really adding anything of note. It probably would not have hurt to have done a 50/50 proportion of vanilla and chocolate: this way, the vanilla has more of a point, and we still are getting the chocolate cake element through the chocolate brownie pieces. Alternatively, some variance in texture might have made the vanilla component stand out more, like maybe substituting the vanilla ice cream with marshmallow creme or something similar. We're not sure if it would work, but as it stands, the vanilla swirl seems kind of pointless.

Overall, we thought this was a good ice cream, and a nice tribute to black forest cake. The texture is creamy - which is to be expected from Island Farms ice cream - and the flavour was nice.

Recommend to a friend? Yes, if they like chocolate-cherry or black forest cake
Repurchase? J: Yes - B: Maybe, if it was on sale