What's the Best Vanilla Ice Cream at the Supermarket?

vanilla is america's favorite flavor of ice cream and today jack's going to tell us which brand is the cream of the crop how are you doing i'm doing okay we're not eating ice cream cones just in case you're wondering but i wanted to demonstrate one of the biggest differences that nobody thinks about which is the amount of air that gets pumped into ice creams called overrun so these are the exact same amount of ice cream why wait really one of them this one has a lot of air this one is dense and creamy does not have a lot of overrun i'm not going to make a mess i'm going to put these down but overrun can add about 20 percent air up to 120 percent well that can affect the mouth feel also how it freezes whether it's really hard um whether it's soft and creamy whether it's dense and rich light and fluffy i'm gonna dig right in dig in i brought three brands here they're interesting samples we started with 17 look at this lineup over here couple things we learned whether it's french original homemade those don't really mean much if it has specks of vanilla bean it probably has less vanilla flavor those are ground-up beans that they've already used to make extract but they look pretty they look pretty actually if you want real vanilla flavor which our tasters did you want to use either pure or imitation extract rather than the ground up beans pure has a little bit of booziness to it because pure extract is made with 35 alcohol big differences here in sugar levels sugar as you know has a big impact on texture if there's less sugar it's going to probably not be as creamy and maybe a little on the icy side big differences in fat and i like high fat and high sugar ice cream so that's my favorite anything you're noticing here i mean you've been because you're eating vanilla ice cream this is a wonderful tasting by the way i'm having a lot of fun just eating this this is my least favorite by far you said icy it's icy i see the specs but some of the specs are a little big and i actually feel like i felt one on my tongue it was almost like a little pebble so this is my least favorite okay i liked both of these i don't like the color of this one but if i close my eyes i like the creaminess but i think i actually prefer this one this one's very good something about this one i like how it feels it feels fatty i like seeing the specks i'm a sucker for a good speck and it's sweet but i like sweet so you made your decision we're going with the middle sample this is my favorite this is really good though and that i don't like at all the two of us agree oh we do and the audience agrees and we disagree with the tasting pan really so we're all going to go watch it so we're rebels we're we're rebels we all picked the runner-up which as far as i'm concerned is the best sample here take it over ben and jerry wow oh congratulations good yeah so this one has less air so this low overrun it's really dense it's really creamy it's super rich it's absolutely delicious yep the tasting panel actually preferred the expert panel the turkey hill so the turkey has a much higher overrun so it's got a lot more air some people in the tasting battle said well i can eat more of it that's that's one theory that's one theory that one has some corn syrup in it which gives it a nice sort of gooey texture even though it's got a lot of air it's not uh super fluffy yeah it's almost a bit chewy yeah a little chewy and that's probably from the corn syrup so that was the winner the studio on it that was a close runner up for the studio audience although they agreed with me and with you they actually like the ben and jerry's that's good so down here at the end so this one halo top's been getting a lot of press they actually put the calories on the package it's only 280 calories per pint the idea is that you're not going to eat it all because it doesn't taste very good i think the idea is it's only 280 calories so you could eat the whole thing but it was the only brand we didn't recommend of everything we tasted because we felt like it was really icy now it's not so much that it's low fat it's low sugar so it has stevia to make up for that but the sugar content is so low that it's very icy now if you want a low-fat ice cream and i don't know do we want a low-fat ice cream we did find one brand it's 80s slow churned it's called dryers on the west coast that we actually thought was as good as the full fat brand so rather than the halo top which is getting all the press if you really want low fat go for ed's slow churn but honestly i don't really want low-fat ice cream i'm with you thanks jack you're welcome so there you have it if you want to agree with me jack and the studio audience you want to buy ben and jerry's vanilla ice cream but the winner of the tasting is turkey hill original vanilla premium ice cream which is 2.99 for one and a half quarts [Applause] thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 564,969

Keywords: cooks country, americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, ice cream taste test, vanilla ice cream, taste test, tasting, vanilla ice cream taste test, best vanilla ice cream

Id: -gxC4B_WGYI

Length: 5min 11sec (311 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021