The "Häagen-Dazs ice cream" thread
 

Is their anyone else who thinks Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry ice creams are bland, over rated and over priced? The supermarkets own brands here in the UK are much better and half the price. What about in your part of the World?

No. I have never had ice cream that I like better than Haagen Dazs. A few equals, but none better. I don't mind paying a bit more for (IMO) perfection.

Edited to add: I find B&Js to be a very different type of ice cream than HD. The only thing remotely similar is the price point.

Haagen Dazs icecream
 

Ben and Jerry's Milk and Cookies is SO DELICIOUS

I'll agree that H-D is nothing special but I like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia.

Have to agree - I find them over-fatty, over-sweet and way overpriced.

(Although out of the big brand ones, I'd have to say Carte d'Or wins in the blandness stakes...)

Agreed absolutely with the OP. HD and Ben and Jerrys are sickly sweet and almost inedible.

Ironically just had this conversation yesterday with my father, who LOVES HD. I just am not knocked out about it and have had much better, creamier tasting ice cream. And b/c he loves it, that was all I grew up eating and have tried a lot of their flavors. I do love their raspberry sorbet though.

B&J is ok for me, personally love their chocolate fudge brownie.

Haagen Dazs ice cream
 

Read the label and you see that HD not only tastes amazing but it is all simple as it used to be. BJ has a lot of unreadable ingredients and tastes just weird. Personally I like simple flavors. Fudge and peanut butter are not my cup of tea. Blue Bell (US south) makes an amazing vanilla flavor and even some other flavors similar to BJ and it is quite affordable.

And yes I have had better than HD at very local creameries that make their own batches. Unfortunately this happens seasonally.

Ice cream should be made with pure cream, not ravoniflavoids or Yellow 5
And HD is the best mass commercial brand out there.

I love HD.
Ben & Jerry's not so much.

Haagen Dazs ice cream
 

HD makes ice cream. As a purist I love their vanilla. Others make ice skim milk or ice whatever not ice cream. There is a difference. Not to say that you can find some great store brand vanillas. Same with chocolate. HD is nice and rich the way I would expect it to be. With the myriad of all the other possible flavors it gets hard to compare brands.

What ingredients are in those supermarket ice cream?

I am partial to Tesco's Finest Bourbon Ice Cream at the moment, the ingredients are:

Whole Milk,Double Cream (Milk) (34%) ,Demerara Sugar ,Dried Skimmed Milk ,Pasteurised Free Range Egg ,Bourbon Vanilla Extract (0.5%).

Not sure what Alinlondon is referring to as "half the price" without a supermarket discount offer (BOGOF, 3 for 2, 2nd half price, etc.) is pushing it when comparing like for like ice creams with premium ingredients amongst all the supermarkets.

Here's a selection from 3 of the bigger players in the British market:

Waitrose seriously creamy Madagascan Vanilla:
Whole milk, whipping cream (34%), demerara sugar, skimmed milk powder, pasteurised free range egg, sugar, Madagascan vanilla extract (0.5%), Madagascan vanilla powder.
£4 for 500ml


Sainsbury's Vanilla Ice Cream, Taste the Difference
Whole Jersey Milk*(50%), Double Cream* (25%), Unrefined Cane Sugar, Skimmed Milk Powder*, Free Range Egg Yolk, Madagascan Vanilla Extract, Vanilla Powder * From Cow's Milk
£4 for 500ml


Tesco Finest Madagascan Vanilla Ice Cream
Whole Milk, Double Cream (Milk) (34%), Demerara Sugar, Dried Skimmed Milk, Pasteurised Free Range Egg, Sugar, Madagascan Vanilla (0.4%) (Vanilla Extract, Crushed Vanilla Pods)
£3 for 500ml


Haagen-Dazs Dairy Vanilla
Fresh Cream, Condensed Skimmed Milk, Sugar, Egg Yolk, Natural Vanilla Flavouring
£4.50 for 500ml
Hmmmm... Condensed milk (and a hefty proportion at that), no wonder it is so sickly sweet!

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Edit to add
Sorry to miss your latest response, Alinlondon
Tesco brand premium ice cream is consistent with your first post
Nearly half the price of Haagen Dasz and I would agree that the Bourbon Vanilla example has better ingredients (although this can be argued, particularly by those with sweet teeth!)

the death of haagen dazs:

Häagen-Dazs was bought by Pillsbury in 1983. General Mills bought Pillsbury in 2001.[13][14] However, in the United States and Canada, Häagen-Dazs products are produced by Nestlé subsidiary Dreyer's, which acquired the rights as part of the General Mills-Pillsbury deal.[15][16] The brand name is still owned by General Mills but is licensed to Nestlé in the US and Canada.

The best ice cream is that which you make yourself. Nothing from the factories comes close. I've found most of them far too sweet.

i agree. we bought a machine. i threw it out after i gained 10 pounds. same thing with the home made pasta machine.

I love Ben & Jerry's*...mint chocolate cookie and oatmeal cookie crunch are my favorites.

*a heartless multinational corporation masquerading as a couple of hippies from Vermont

Condensed skimmed milk has no sweeteners added. Perhaps you are thinking of sweetened condensed milk? Whatever sweetness HD has comes from the sugar.

I do see that the other brands you listed have very respectable ingredient lists. That is not the norm in the US. HD is one of the very few that does not contain stabilizers and emulsifiers like carragean and guar gum among many others. Many also contain HFCS instead of sugar. Although the sweetness level of the HD flavors I normally buy (vanilla, strawberry, rocky road) is perfect for me, I would love to try the brands you listed.

I'd be interested to know what the sugar content of unsweetened condensed milk is.

One can expect 100g of standard milk to have 5g of sugar (5%). My guess is that 100g of condensed milk would have something close to 15g of sugar. If unsweetened condensed milk makes up 200g, that's potentially an extra 20g of sugar (plus the 10g one expects milk to have naturally) that gets sneaked in undeclared into a Haagen Dasz 500g tub.

Concentrated apple juice is one of the ways companies add sugar "secretly" to children's foods and other products, milk is naturally sweet (or should be) and concentrating it makes it sweeter.

Sweetened condensed milk is more along the lines of how most of Ben & Jerry's flavours taste to me :eek:

Thanks for the obituary and reminder.

Definitely. I have a source of farm fresh organic milk/cream and eggs near Elmira ON (is that part of Wellington County?) which is used for my home churned ice-cream (custard based). You control the sugar content.

Dairy from the UK.

The main difference, IMO, is the superior lusciousness of the UK dairy products :). Even simple milk tastes better in the UK and don't get me started on chocolate. I don't know what it is about the quality of the dairy products in the UK but the US is no comparison. I'm not talking about small source creameries but the mass market stuff. And yes, OP, I agree with you. I'd take UK store brand double cream ice cream over Hagen Dazs any day.

But B&J Chocolate Therapy is something else entirely :D.

Still in the US we have to make do with what we've got. Hands down my favorite ice cream can be had at Rich's Farm in CT where you can watch the cows grazing on the hill while you enjoy your freshly made ice cream.

It is the overly-processed diary product in North America on super-market shelves.

I was at one of the cow to cone places a long time ago and my son (age 4 back then) asked which cow his ice-cream came from.

Just as a note, Haggen Dazs Vanilla in the US does not contain condensed skim milk. http://www.haagendazs.com/Products/Product/2473.

I totally agree with you about B&J. The flavors I've tried are extremely sweet. Far, far sweeter than HD.

I wonder if the laws are different in the USA and condensed milk doesn't have to be declared as such (or if they condense the milk themselves in their own factories perhaps there is no need to list it as anything but milk).

Reason I wonder about this is that the Japanese Haagen Dazs website lists condensed/concentrated milk as an ingredient also.
クリーム、脱脂濃縮乳、砂糖、卵黄、バニラ香料、（原材料の一部に卵白を含む）
cream, skimmed concentrated milk, sugar, egg yolk, vanilla flavoring, (Including the egg white in a part of the raw materials)
http://www.haagen-dazs.co.jp/product...p/vanilla.html

It's not too far. Elmira is in Waterloo Region which is adjacent to Wellington County.

Let me just tell you one quick, incontrovertible truth: B&J's Phish Food is the best damn ice cream ever made. Bar none.

Self described as containing "chocolatey shaped fish", marketing speak for chocolate flavoured crap.

Those things are vile, and taste nothing like real chocolate, lots of them too, so that picking them out is a chore.

Ingredients:
Cream (23%), Water, Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Condensed Skimmed Milk, Cocoa, Coconut Oil, Milkfat, Egg Yolks, Egg Whites, Natural Flavours, Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Pectin, Carrageenan), Anhydrous Milk Fat, Emulsifier (Soya Lecithin) Salt, Vanilla Extract.

Agreed that nothing beats homemade ice cream, but if I'm buying it at the supermarket it's H-D only. Just start reading the ingredient lists on the various brands -- most of them, even so-called super-premium brands that cost much more than H-D, are full of stabilizers and thickeners and other junk. Some of the H-D flavors have more artificial ingredients than others, but there are a handful that contain only 3 or 4 ingredients. These have a pure taste and dense, creamy texture that freezes very hard.

You're over-complicating it. In the US (and the UK, I assume), nutrition labels show how many grams of sugar are in a product. Simply compare the sugar content of the ice cream you like to the sugar content of one you find to be too sweet.

Our one wedding gift regret. We registered for an ice cream maker, received it, then returned it, thinking we wouldn't end up using it. And now... who has the time :(

I was at Italy for 2 weeks last summer. I have gelato everyday at different places and my favorite ice cream is still Haagen-Dazs Rum Raisin.

Have you been to Fatamorgana in Rome? I would trade my lifetime of ice cream quota for their hazelnut gelato. Yum...

Haagen Dazs Strawberry ^

+1. And the Coffee. Those are two of the best H-D flavors with very short ingredient lists.

Since when is "bland" equivalent to "overly sweet?

Some Haagen Dasz flavors are ok, but I'm more a Movenpick guy. It makes me sad that we can't get it in the US :(

I had to google Movenpick -- seems to be available just about everywhere but here :td: If I ever see it in my travels, I will definitely try some -- they have some interesting flavors.

Two words:

Frozen yogurt

One of the easiest desserts you can make.

Prepare your meal. Just before taking dinner to the table dump 3 measures of Greek (strained) yogurt, 1 measure of maple syrup and a teaspoon of vanilla essence (or a tablespoon of whisky if you prefer) into the ice cream maker and leave to cool and churn.

Or add a third to a half of a sweet tasting fruit purée to two thirds strained yogurt.

By the time you're done eating dinner the ice cream is ready.

I hardly buy ice cream anymore, I bought the ice cream maker as soon as my child started on solids and have never regretted it. The stuff I make doesn't store well (not enough sugar, gums, alcohol etc and so freezes solid within a day or two) but it's unbeatable just made and I know exactly what my child is eating. I'm not against sugar per se, but it's amazing how little you need when you're using decent yogurt, the fruit is good and ripe and you don't need to store the end product for any length of time.

Can't say I agree with anyone saying Haagen Daas is overrated. I like to say that their vanilla beats anyone else's flavors. Their chocolate peanut butter is my favorite ice cream out there.

Ben & Jerrys I can get behind a bit more, I went through a phase where I ate it a lot but recently find it not worth the price.

For those who're praising H-D, do you have or have you explored local ice cream purveyors?

As much as I love H-D's Belgian Chocolate, here in the Bay Area, we've got Marianne's, Double Rainbow, and even Magnolia (a filipino brand made in the US) that are all widely available in grocery stores, and to me at least, a step up in taste and mouth feel.

I find it really hard to believe H-D is the best most folks can get...

Many of the gelato places in touristy location around Itatly get their gelato from a supplier that is a subsidiary of Parmalat.