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: 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: 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.

Flavour Showdown: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Sometimes a classic flavour like vanilla, chocolate, or cookies n' creme is made by several different brands. If they're all similarly priced, how do you decide which to choose?

Thus the inspiration for tonight's Ultimate Flavour Showdown. Since I was already planning to attend a party tonight with a group of classmates, I decided to bring three variations on the flavour of chocolate chip cookie dough, made by Ben & Jerry's, Breyers, and Island Farms so my classmates could help me decide which brand truly captured the essence of cookie dough in ice cream form. As I went through the check-out at the grocery store, the man behind me, after I explained why I was buying so much ice cream, expressed his confidence that Ben & Jerry's would be the clear winner, with Breyers in second and Island Farms coming last. Was he correct?

Which ice cream will reign supreme?

Contestant Number One: Breyers 

First up is the Breyers entry, one of their "family classics." The fact that it is called "chocolatey" chip, rather than using the word "chocolate" already tells me that it's fake chocolate, or at least doesn't have enough cocoa in it to be legally deemed chocolate. To be fair, I actually really like the taste of some fake chocolate, but it can also err on the side of horrible. Once you open it up, it's easy to scoop out, but the chocolatey pieces and cookie dough nuggets are small and extremely sparse. We had a hard time finding enough cookie dough pieces to ensure that everyone's sample actually had cookie dough in it! Not a good sign!

Contestant Number Two: Ben & Jerry's

Next we have Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. They have some other awesome-looking cookie-related flavours that I really wanted to try, but this was the fairest one for the sake of comparison. This guy had fairly substantial cookie dough pieces in it, but the real downside was that is was extremely hard to scoop any out! In retrospect, I could have left it out on the counter a bit longer, but I was feeling impatient. Trying to chisel your way through frozen-solid cookie dough is not fun!

Contestant Number Three: Island Farms

Finally we have the Island Farms version from their "Vanilla Plus" line, which was kind of middle of the road in terms of cookie dough distribution; certainly much more than Breyers anyway. Like Breyers, it was easy to scoop and had separate little nuggets of chocolate and cookie dough, rather than the Ben & Jerry's that had the chocolate chips actually mixed into the dough.

So who came out on top? We put a spoonful of each brand into plastic shot glasses on colour-coded plates, and asked the rest of the party guests to sample one from each plate, choose which they liked best, and describe what the ice cream was like. Let the fight commence!

Ice cream shots shots shot shots shots shots shots shots...

After much sampling, considering, and discussion, we took a vote. Out of eleven people, not including myself, these were the results for which brand was liked best:

Breyers: 2 people
Ben & Jerry's: 5 people
Island Farms: 4 people


Though no one really hated any of the options, Breyers did not get a lot of fans, and the primary reason was the lack of mix-ins. For a cookie dough ice cream, there just wasn't enough cookie dough! Some people also felt it was "too creamy" in an unnatural sort of way.

Island Farms was close to Ben & Jerry's, and it may have been partly due to the smaller size of the cookie dough pieces, the fact that there were more of them, and the flavour and texture of the ice cream component. Personally, I found the cookie dough in this brand to be extremely gritty, and at some points I almost felt like I was chewing on sand.

I will have to agree with the majority and say that Ben & Jerry's, as the man at the check-out predicted, was the superior product in this comparison. Their cookie dough actually seemed like something you might feasibly be able to bake cookies out of, and even though it was a giant pain in the butt to try to scoop out, it had good flavour that didn't seem artificial, and the texture wasn't offensive.

At the check-out, all three worked out to be about $6.99 CAD, but since the Breyers and Island Farms flavours were on sale, the Ben & Jerry's did have a lower regular price. Yes, it's a much smaller container, but I think this taste test shows that it is worth the money.

-B

(if anyone who helped test has anything to add, please feel free!)

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