Ice Cream Expert Guesses Cheap vs Expensive Ice Creams | Price Points | Epicurious

I'm Jenny Britton Bower and I'm an ice-cream expert okay it looks like we have a vanilla ice cream actually it looks like a vanilla bean ice cream which means that there are the little specks from the inside of the vanilla bean pod in the ice cream that is probably adding a little bit of flavor so let me tell you what I look for when I'm tasting ice cream you can evaluate all ice creams on these for sort of facets of ice cream flavor texture body and finish flavor is what you taste on your tongue and also in your experience in your nose right texture is the finest between your tongue and the roof of your mouth of the ice cream or grittiness right and so ice cream can run that whole spectrum body is kind of like the elasticity of the ice cream or how it rolls into a ball how it scoops and then of course we're left with the finish of the ice cream which is after a few minutes what's still left on your palate just visually our sample a is is brighter white it definitely has flecks of Anila nib and B is a slightly darker white if you will it's darker in color and that could be for a few reasons it could be because it has more vanilla in it more of those specks or even more vanilla extract it could also be the dairy you know with the cows are fed when it starts to melt the ice cream you can start to see the butterfat kind of rising to the top and you can see it almost as like a sheen and I'm definitely seeing that over here like a little bit of that Sheen from some butter fat if I had to guess at this point although it could be wrong I would guess that our sample B would have a little bit more butter fat in it I'm ready to taste these flavors and vanilla is one of my favorite flavors so I can't wait oh I can tell just by touching the ice cream this one is got a pretty high overrun over on us is the word we use for air content you have to have a little bit of air in ice cream to make it feel creamy alright let's go now let me tell you how I taste ice cream because it's all about scent use the air that you can fill up in your face in like scent it with what's on your tongue I mean like it's about breathing it's very sweet ice cream is sweet maybe that's a little bit of fructose in there maybe it's just a some cane sugar which is a little more sucrose and those are very sore top note sugars vanilla is everywhere it's a fairly top note vanilla I don't get a lot of smokiness and my palate is definitely coated with a decent amount of butterfat and now our be just putting my spoon in it feels definitely denser and a little heavier a very different vanilla over here he has I think a little bit more butter fat in it I think there's a little bit more complexity to this vanilla it's a really beautiful ice cream if I had to guess which one is more expensive I'm going to go with B I feel like it's got more cream in it the vanilla might be a slightly higher quality vanilla two more of those notes in it so let's see there you go yes doll a tiny a point versus $6.99 a point so there are many reasons an ice-cream can cost a little bit more or a lot more if it's a higher cream ice cream it's going to be more expensive because there's only a little bit of butter fat in every gallon of milk and you've got to concentrate that to make a really good ice cream most ice creams that are more expensive are gonna have a lower quantity of air air is free of course so it makes something a little bit less expensive one way to know what you're getting in your ice cream is to is to compare calorie counts your higher calorie one we usually have a little more butter fat in it and less air I always think that it's not the place in my week that I want to skimp on calories it's actually a place that I want to look for more more calories because a few more calories in a scoop makes a big difference if vanilla is your favorite flavor you might not have to pay more or very much money to have a great scoop of course a flavor like vanilla which has been around forever and ever and ever is gonna have some efficiencies built into the system oK we've got chocolate to taste now clearly we're gonna notice color first in chocolate a is a darker color and B is a lighter color chocolate it could mean that a has more cocoa or chocolate in it but it could also mean that we're working with different kinds of cocoa a Dutch processed cocoa is gonna appear darker but actually tastes sometimes a little bit lighter in chocolate it's a little bit different it can be tricky because a lower butter fat but higher cocoa ice cream can actually be a richer chocolate experience if there's a chocolate with a lot of butter fat in that you're probably not gonna get as much chocolate in it and butter fat can also be a barrier to flavor when you want that sort of bitterness of chocolate if you add a lot of cocoa powder to your cream and sugar you can dry out your ice cream often ice cream makers will not add as much cocoa simply because it dries it out and makes it too dry unless you really know what you're doing the science of this ice cream is getting that aspect of it right and then the other reason of course that an ice cream maker might not use as much cocoa is because it's a very expensive ingredient when you scoop an ice cream you'll get striations and it sort of almost looks like like like feathering so when I'm looking at ice cream I can often but not always tell air content by the amount of space between the feathers of the ice cream they both look like they have a maybe about the same amount of air content in them so I'm ready to taste these ice creams and see how they bloom I'm gonna make a bit of a guess and say that B might have slightly less cocoa and it's slightly less of that chocolate flavors I'm gonna go with that first let's see mmm it's a nice almost kind of a slightly dark but kind of milk chocolate very clean ice cream it's sweet of course always from is sweet but you know I use could be sweet in different ways depending on what kinds of sugar it can it contains you can get very very almost cotton candy sweet if you have a lot of fructose in there but this is just a very clean ice cream and um and not too sweet okay ready for a also very rich very fudge like you can I don't know if you can see I mean it almost has no air and it's almost like a terrine chocolate does that two ice creams I mean this both both of these samples have a very richness to them even before you taste them very chocolaty I don't want to smile because I feel like I'm gonna have chocolate all over me this one is all about the chocolate without question it's just keeps blooming and going from a chocolate perspective this one's also a very nice chocolate it's a little more about the dairy aspect of the chocolate but neither one of these seem like they're they have stabilizers and that a stabilizer is an ingredient that ice cream makers will often use to to thicken and ice cream to hold water and to build stability so that an ice cream can melt and refreeze without losing quality both of these are melting so cleanly I don't get any of the sort of stickiness that often stabilizers will bring so I would say that both these are very very high quality ice creams this one's going to have clearly a lot more chocolate in it than this one if I'm guessing I'm gonna go with a is the more expensive of these two ice-creams mostly because it has so much more chocolate de let's see yep yep but but not too far off the more cocoa the more chocolate that's in the ice cream the more expensive of course it's gonna be so when you're picking out a chocolate ice cream the best thing you can do is start with your preferences do you like milk chocolate or do you like dark chocolate another interesting facet of chocolate ice cream especially a dark chocolate ice cream it will often have lower fat content so it's a different situation with the calorie content if you're talking about an expensive chocolate ice cream that's lower in fat but still at a higher price point it's probably because it has a lot of cocoa in it which is an expensive ingredient in and displaces that fat don't just go by color go by what you like and what what the flavor is that you want to experience in your chocolate okay it looks like we've got some strawberry ice cream strawberries like some other fruits too are a water soluble scent which just means that the scent in strawberry will adhere to the water that's already in the ice cream the cream and the milk contain a lot of water the really complicated thing about making strawberry ice cream is that you can't add that many strawberries to it without making it very icy so ice cream because they're always grappling with how much strawberry before the whole thing becomes icy we want it to taste like strawberries but we also want it to taste like cream so this will be interesting similar colors are happening between the two a is a little lighter in color than B but not a lot color can really affect what you perceive when you taste it you can get a strong strawberry flavor and not get a strong pink color so a lot of times ice cream makers will add like a little bit of pink coloring or maybe even like just some beet juice to bring out that color a little bit I mean both look well pretty creamy yeah I kind of want to get in and try them I'll start with a this time little sticky that could be a sugar it could be a stabilizer when I was growing up strawberry was my favorite flavor so I don't think I've ever met a strawberry assume that I don't like it tastes a lot of strawberries they're very clean strawberries I feel like there's a little bit of a mouth-watering finish which a lot of times comes from a stabilizer so we'll see all right let's go with the color is a little more pronounced here it's a little Pinker definitely very dense yeah this one's a denser ice cream a little maybe less air you know it's funny because not all you can't always smell ice creams while they're frozen but but strawberry is is one that you can I guess because I'm there's a lot of scent going on in the air here before I even try it that's an interesting strawberry ice cream mmm almost almost like a yogurt scent to it I don't understand what's happening with this one it's almost like it tastes like a candy strawberry bubblegum is what it is it's a strawberry bubblegum flavor so they're clearly using a flavour in here which I will just say I mean worked with strawberries all my life is completely unnecessary strawberries are very strong in scent and they will permeate all of the cream okay so here's my guess I would guess that this one's gonna be more expensive because it seems like it's got a lot of tricks in it it's got some kind of acidity happening in there that's like thickening and I don't know if it's yogurt or something else and then on top of it some other flavor it's very very dense if I have to guess it's somebody who's trying to make really good ice cream and it's just not very good here we go oh good grief it's perfect great look at this 10:27 now if that isn't evidence that not all expensive ice creams are worth it then I don't know what is too many extra bells and whistles or whatever just aren't necessary a is lean tasting it's very simple with some of these sort of standard classic flavors you get the efficiencies of the system that just can't be really beat or you can't make every ice cream I think for $2.99 a pint clearly this strawberry you think is a good one okay it looks like we've got some coffee ice cream one of the reasons that I can tell that this is coffee as opposed to chocolate is its color it's a warmer tan than like a milk chocolate or a chocolate would be and then also because our sample II actually has coffee grounds in it I will tell you that they will continue to bloom even while they sit in the ice cream this is a great example of when you look at the ice creams they look different this one a it looks a little like what we call in the in the business we call it soggy and it just doesn't have a creaminess factor that this one has around the perimeter the B sample is starting to melt and I can see some of that butter fat sheen which I'm definitely not getting already in our a that butter fat is gonna carry so much of that sent to your nose when you experience a good coffee ice cream I think that it tastes like coffee smells to achieve that we can steep coffee beans right in the milk and cream and that's the best because then all of that scent actually adheres to the butter fat butter fat melts below body temperature so even when it's frozen all of those notes of coffee will bloom into your nose just like I call a chocolate actually so let's get in and try it and see what will we discover so I'm going with you first well it's a little airier than I thought it would be honestly it's very light but it smells very rich and even before I take a bite I can smell it it really tastes like a bag of coffee smells and that's really important the flavor and the scent it's all there okay so the interesting thing about sample a is that it's looked exactly like this since it came out which is like a little sort of flat I can just tell by bouncing my own dough that this is very very stabilized ice cream do I have to eat this it's very Airy - not very much coffee coming off of it all right here guys the first thing I noticed is that it's very sweet it has notes of caramel which tells me that somebody is using a flavorings this is nothing like opening up a bag of fresh coffee like it's it's not even close it's not even in the ballpark I would say this is the exact reason to spend more on ice cream if you're a coffee lover you want to spend more on coffee ice cream because it should really shine in ice cream um you know the ice cream platform is a great place for coffee okay so I'm gonna say that he is the more expensive of the two and that a is the less expensive so let's see yep about right $9 versus under $2 that's a big price difference sample a you can really feel the sort of chewiness that the stabilizers bring and it's a stringiness almost to the ice cream whereas over here the flavor is beautiful and when you when you get it on your palate it melts in just the right way so I feel like it's um it's you know more a better made ice cream when it comes to reading ingredient labels on an ice cream pint that's an important indicator of quality you can really read the quality on the ingredient label if toward the bottom you're looking at a lot of different kinds of sugars ingredient that you don't recognize mono and diglycerides polysorbate 80 those kinds of ingredients then it can be an indicator that it's a lower quality ice cream because better ice cream makers don't need all of those stabilizers and I'm also Harrison just wouldn't use them well it looks like we've got two completely different versions of not just mint chocolate chip but green mint chip because even though our sample a is very pale in color it's still a green you know maybe it indicates that it's made with a fresh mint leaf and then we have our more traditional green mint chip with that bright mint green color this one looks a little bit marshmallowy and marshmallowy indicates the sort of stable foam meaning that there's stabilizers here not necessarily a bad thing and I can smell the mint on there a has far fewer chocolate chips than our sample B does which seems to be positively loaded with chips which is pretty fun so let's jump into tasty let's see I'm not getting mint just by smelling it hmm very interesting I'm trying to break out of my nostalgia and get to what I think about the flavor right because I have an idea of what I expect this to taste like and it doesn't it's a little bit salty which is interesting just a little bit of grit I think it's pretty high in butter fat I even see little specks of what I think are fresh mint so I think it's a fresh mint ice cream yeah it's very marshmallowy with a flavor like this especially that's not necessarily a bad thing these are nostalgic flavors you know there's something about the texture that kind of plays into that as well like a slumber party you know it just like takes you right back all right here we go it's got a really bouncy almost chewy body I'm not a huge fan of this mint it's got more of a um like a toothpaste I'm going to guess that our expensive version is version a because it's a fresh mint because it has a few extra bells and whistles high-quality ingredients assembled maybe not in a perfect way but I do think that every ingredient in here is a high-quality ingredient I think B is gonna be far less expensive but I don't think it's a terrible ice cream it's kind of like a you know preference thing like like all ice creams actually so let's see eleven dollars versus two dollars and thirteen cents there you go our $11 a scream probably involves more hand work you know fresh mint which is which is challenging I know cuz I've done that many times I mean just getting the spiders out of fresh mint can be like challenging in its own self okay when you get a big huge pile of fresh mint in your kitchen that somebody picked out of a garden for you you have to wash them and literally get the spiders out because there are spiders and mint anyway it's it's a nostalgic flavor so if you love that sort of candied green mint and that's your preference there is that it you go for it because that's really something special our sample a is a different kind of mint chocolate over green mint chip it's the fresh mint and it's got some good chocolate in it clearly some some decent quality dairy I would say that this is absolutely worth the the money this is really fun two flavors that are so different from each other I'm not even sure how they could be in the same category one is very yellow with chocolate swirl maybe some other chocolate pieces in it it looks like we have a non / L the little spherical sprinkles hanging out over here huh maybe it's like a cupcake or something like that I'm gonna pick it up and examine it a little closer that's sort of Sheen on on the surface of when it's melting you can kind of tell that there's some butter fat in there alright let's examine our very white ice cream over here which is not melting at all and so that indicates a cocktail of stabilizers and emulsifiers I think I should just go in and try it because I don't know what else I'm gonna glean from just looking at them alright let's look at some body happenin here definitely got some body on this ice cream hmm Wow I just ate something that I did not like those wax candies that you like open up and pour in your mouth from like the 70s if you ate the wax that was what it tasted there felt like these blind tastings are really difficult when I can't figure out what's in that but if it's on the label and I'm expecting it then it's a different experience okay now I'm interested because it looks like there's some like chunks I don't know this is very marshmallow I mean it's like this is like marshmallow cream here mm-hmm clearly it's a piece of cake mm-hmm what we have here our two flavors of ice cream that have mix-ins in them they have they're about the the other stuff not sir candies or in these cases sprinkles and little little bits of KP very highly stabilization of the flavoring isn't terrible and I will tell you that I believe that my own children would probably love this flavor gosh I'd be hard-pressed to figure out which one of these is gonna be more expensive I think that it's a and I think that's because there's a lot going on it has lots of different things in it but I think the base of the ice cream is meant to taste like a cake B I think is going to be our less expensive ice cream it seems like it's cheaply made I mean it's definitely full of stabilizers it's just got a few pieces in it they're very cookie cutter kind of cuts I feel like it's more of an industrial you made ice cream so should we check okay so $5.99 and a dollar at 13 this one is definitely worth of how to dollar-for-dollar 13 a pint I think it's like a birthday cake flavor and you know there's something super fun about that I think if you're looking for a birthday cake maybe maybe you're looking for something like this and there's nothing wrong with that that's just fine it's in these sort of fashion flavors or the novelty flavors that ice cream makers personalities really come through we can do a lot with with ice cream we can scent and flavor our sort of base of the ice cream and then we can add swirls or jams or sauces crunchy bits all sorts of different things you can do and you can tell a story that way and I think clearly this ice cream maker did that and actually that's kind of where all of our popular flavors start out anyway to a kid a flavor like birthday cake is gonna seem like a creative kind of almost gourmet flavor I think in some places paying you know $1 13 a pint for a birthday cake flavor is absolutely acceptable perfect and exactly what you might need quality ice cream can be very labor-intensive and very expensive to produce but you should get what you pay for and ultimately it's about your preference and that's the only thing that matters may I also suggest while I'm at it eat it from a cone you get to go on that journey with it all the way to the bottom and it is a wonderful way to eat ice cream it's a wonderful way to get to know somebody else better and be in the moment with them so enjoy ice cream and have a great summer

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 3,904,018

Rating: 4.8333263 out of 5

Keywords: cheap, cheap vs expensive, cheap vs expensive food, coffee, expert, food, ice cream, price, price points, recipes, strawberry, taste test, vanilla, vanilla ice cream, how to make ice cream, ice cream expert, cheap ice cream, ice cream taste test, most expensive ice cream, ice cream reviews, cheap vs expensive ice cream, chocolate ice cream, strawberry ice cream, coffee ice cream, ice cream recipes, mint chocolate chip ice cream, epicurious

Id: lma9TNjj_O8

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/suicidalkatt]

Honestly love these videos.

They really throw you into the very details of an industry without needing to know all the ins and outs.

Love that they've done so many now.

[u/8ball05]

She totally freaked that guy out with the spiders in mint comment.

[u/natscar]

That's a 10!

[u/iberky]

If you're in the Columbus Ohio area, check out one of her ice cream stores (restaurants?), Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream. Unsurprisingly, it's crazy good.

[u/ehgitt]

I'm no expert but I can tell cheap ice cream from good ice cream every time.

[u/Peregrine7]

I've been waiting for an expert to comment like she did on the strawberry. That was amazingly spot on.

[u/BLAHFUK]

Has anyone ever been wrong on one of these? I've never seen it

[u/[deleted]]

She should review Lidl's mint icecream.

Made with concentrated mint extract so every once in a while you get a bite of icecream that makes your whole face go numb...

[u/Mind101]

Do people really pay upwards of $10 for what amounts to a little under half a liter of ice cream?

That sounds ridiculously expensive to me.