Ice cream season is here, as if we needed any excuse. But are those posh pint cartons in the freezer cabinet really worth the extra? Or should I just content myself with the bigger, less expensive tubs?
I raided the supermarkets for 19 different kinds of chocolate ice cream and scooped them into bowls. Manufacturers rely on packaging to indicate which are premium and which are mid-range The more expensive ice cream is sold in “pint” tubs (actually 460-500ml, so more like an American pint of 473ml than a British pint at 568ml), to align it with brands like Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s. Cheaper ice cream, like Carte D’or, is in the oval plastic tubs, usually holding 900ml of more mid-range ice cream. So without this helpful nudge, would I be able to tell the difference?
Skip to:
- The taste test
- The rules for the test
The taste test
Tastes artificial like a sub-par Mr Whippy and melts to a weird spumy consistency. To be fair, there are generous chunks of classic Cadbury’s chocolate but this is not a premium ice cream.
Very sweet but not that chocolatey and melted fast. Bits of biscuit taste a bit stale. Not as good as Ben and Jerry’s.
It’s not sweet, which is good, but it has a soapy flavour and a weird after-taste. Not very chocolatey either. Contains cheap fat.
The flavour’s not too sweet, but there is an odd cardboardy aftertaste and not enough chocolate curls. Not good enough at the price, especially with the raft of additives.
Interesting crunch from the chocolate bits. Bland but not too sweet.
Lightweight with plenty of additives and melting to a thick, gloopy liquid. The sprinkles are pretty but the flavour is dull. All fur coat and no knickers.
Not that chocolatey and poor quality chocolate with a slight flavour of cooked milk.
Not too sweet with decent chocolate flavour but it leaves the residue of fat on your tongue. There’s a lot of air in this one (124% overrun) so it’s less of a bargain than it seems.
A bit powdery but more chocolatey than some, though it tastes more milky than dark and bitter. Very infoffensive.
Super-sweet with an almost honey/caramel flavour and a spumy texture. There’s a nice balance of sauce to ice cream but it’s not pure chocolate.
Creamier than the others but nothing exciting. Would be okay on the side or as the foil for a really good sauce, but it’s not good enough to be the main focus.
A more grown-up chocolate flavour that’s sweet-ish with a pleasantly bitter quality. However, the texture is not smooth and there are ice crystals in it.
This is good for a plant-based ice cream. Quite chocolatey but in a one-dimensional way and very sweet (it’s higher in sugars than others).
Very smooth with a pleasant bitterness but not much complexity. There’s a faint powderiness and it’s full of air, too.
There’s decent chocolate in this one. It’s light, with a nice balanced bitterness and depth of flavour. Not powdery but there’s lots of air.
The flavour is rich and indulgent with ribbons of chocolate caramel sauce. Only six ingredients and none of them ultra-processed.
Tastes natural and not too sweet. Best of the lower-cost ice creams and better than several of the more expensive versions.
Little flecks of chocolate melt on the tongue and boost the intense, roasted cocoa bean flavour. Decent ingredients, and the lowest overrun ratio of all we tried, making it surprisingly good value.
The rules for the test
To assist me in this “ice challenge”, I corralled Pat Powell, who with her brother Bruno Forte and their Italian family set up Swoon Gelato in Bristol in 2016. They won Supreme Champion at the Great Taste Awards 2019 for their Nocciola (chocolate and hazelnut) gelato, making them experts in the field. They don’t supply supermarkets, so there’s no conflict of interest.
Pat gave me a quick lesson in ice-cream assessment, warning me to to look out for rough water crystals and a powdery texture. For taste, she explained, “I put a spoonful in my mouth and let it melt at the back because then you’ll get the nose kicking in,” revealing the full flavour. No shovelling it in then. She was unfazed by the inclusion of a vegan chocolate sorbet in our collection. “We do a chocolate sorbet that no one can believe isn’t ice cream: churn it slowly enough and it is really dense and creamy.”
As for comparing the premium and mid-range ice creams, it isn’t as straightforward as it should be. First off, ice cream is sold by volume, or millilitres, rather than by weight, or grams – this despite the fact that the nutrition information on the label is calculated per 100g. The honourable exceptions are Häagen-Dazs and Marks & Spencer who give both weight and volume.
The weight matters as more volume may just be more air. Sure, all ice cream has some air beaten into it, as it would just be a solid brick otherwise. But producers have every incentive to whip in as much as they can: bigger product, bigger profit and all for free.
The increase in volume is called “overrun” in the trade. More air makes for ice cream with a lighter texture, but also feels less cold when you eat it. Too much, and the ice cream can lack flavour, or the ability to linger creamily in the mouth. Very high overrun ice creams are also more prone to developing ice crystals.
To work out how much air each tub contained, I weighed all of the tubs and calculated the difference between the weight and the volume of the contents. The premium ice creams varied widely. Häagen-Dazs had a low overrun at about 14%, while Hackney Gelato Plant Based (effectively a sorbet, which you’d expect to have a low air content) was just slightly more at 17%. Those from Jude’s, Booths and Tesco meanwhile were well over 50%. Of the mid-range ice creams, the Waitrose Chocolate Dairy Ice Cream was the best at 88% overrun while Aldi G came in at a whopping 124%.
How all this air stays in the ice cream is largely down to stabilisers and emulsifiers. Not that either is automatically a bad thing. When you’re making it at home and add egg yolk, that’s an emulsifier. Gelatine or egg white is often added to sorbet and gelato as stabilisers so that, as it warms, it can hold its shape a bit without immediately returning to liquid. That becomes more important for supermarket ice creams which are going to have to travel home in a hot car, melting all the way, before being bunged back in the freezer to solidify again.
The manufacturers’ emulsifier and – by extension – stabiliser, of choice is mono and diglycerides of fatty acids, aka E471. (I’m ignoring the soy lecithin listed on most labels, as it is widely used in chocolate making so unconnected with the ice cream process.) E471 tends to make for an ice cream that melts to a weird spumy consistency, as well as being a marker for ultra-processed food. I couldn’t find a mid-range ice cream that didn’t use them, presumably because of that high over-run.
Premium ice cream is another matter. Tesco Finest, Remeo, Booja Booja, Waitrose No 1, M&S Ultimate and Häagen-Dazs all manage without mono –and diglycerides of fatty acids and still scored highly. Yet Booths, Jude’s, Cadbury, and Hackney Gelato all fall back on E471, putting them in the same ultra-processed food category as the cheaper ice cream. Seeing as we found one mid-range ice cream that easily tasted as good as those posh tubs, I know which one I’d choose. Like they say, size isn’t everything.
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