I find it difficult to eat ice cream in the US outside of the US of A, except when US can stand for different things.
The Canadians are reputed to keep their milk in bags. Maybe that has something to do with it.
1: Look, I struggle with the name of our country. "United States" is clearly too long and bureaucratic-sounding. "America" is plainly dismissive of the rest of the hemisphere. And "USA" has been compromised by the jingoistic nogoodniks shouting "USA! USA!" at international sporting events. So it's what I have to work with.
Dairy in rural PA is heavenly. I've deeply loved dairy from all over the world, but nothing comes close to Pequea Valley Farm yogurt. One can also get giant jugs of raw milk here, and the tastiest aged cheddar.
I do really like US dairy.
Do I vaguely remember something about how milk here has a minimum milk protein or fat requirement? Like maybe milk has additional milk proteins added back into it. I'd believe anything of the US milk laws, which are famously complex.
This is the cover story for beer delivery.
You know when dairy isn't good? When it's in the form of a mixture of yogurt and mayonnaise drenched over a bunch of fresh fruit.
That aside, I am having ridiculous amounts of fun over here on the other side of the planet. The bar for all future travel, work-related or not, has been raised.
Different countries dairy products do seem to taste different. Czech 'smetana' and šlehačka [soured versions or not] don't taste like the single creams, or sour creams or creme fraiches, or whipping creams one gets in the UK. The UK versions of all are noticeably better. The Czech versions all taste like they've been made from Elmlea.
9: UK cows more grass-fed, maybe? A girl from Montana that I used to know once told me that she only liked dairy in Ireland and not anywhere else she'd lived.
Ireland & the Uk both have some very cheapo "ice cream" which I think could not be called that in the US. Maybe Cznada has this too.
American ice cream is Italian legendary; Canadian ice cream is probably based on frozen neeps and tatties. dsquared would argue that this is further evidence against the existence of Canada.
10. British "soft scoop" "ice cream" was in part invented by Margaret Thatcher (that is, invented by a company in whose research labs she was working at the time), a thing for which future generations will curse her long after her political antics are forgotten.
Its the steroids we feed our cows. It makes them supercows, which makes them give supermilk.
I don't think a steroid is a good thing to feed a cow. They should be used to advance our understanding of the formation of the solar system, not just to make the milk tastier.
People around here can get pretty fetishistic about all kinds of dairy products. In the houses of the cognoscenti, one is served Hope Creamery butter or no butter at all.
The local groceries around here often have various Central American dairy products, usually some kind of jarred cream-like thing, and I've often wondered just how different Salvadoran, Mexican, and Guatemalan creams are going to be.
I'm still not sure what the first US is supposed to stand for. You are trying to say that of the ice creams in North America, the ones in the United States of America are best, right? So where does the US come from?
Best ice cream anywhere: http://www.bigdippericecream.com
Best gelato anywhere: https://hotchocolates.ca/
I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
10/11: We have soft serve ice cream too; I doubt anyone comes for that.
I think of ice cream as:
1. delicious
2. there's a low bar, above which it's all pretty similarly delicious. Depending on the flavor.
18 is so, so very wrong. There's a low bar above which it's delicious (although there's some truly atrocious shit below that bar), but above that bar there are very clearly degrees of quality and deliciousness. The difference between great ice cream and passable ice cream is at least as obvious as the difference between great wine and passable wine (and, as with wine, the difference between great and passable is only loosely related to price).
America: Obese for Good Reason.
oosa
Please tell me that this a reference to an episode of the animated Planet of the Apes.
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In a seminar on altruism. Pretty sure they're about to start ragging on E.O. Wilson. Will keep people posted.
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15: I'm totally confused about what the confusion is. You confused people want periods in your "US" to make it "U.S."? Or...some other thing?
Stanley: the offending phrase is "ice cream in the US is just somehow magically better in the US of A". I originally thought the first "in the US" was just a glitch, but now that you've defended it (twice), I too am confused. In the context of the post, the sentence could be read without that phrase, as "ice cream is just somehow magically better in the US of A", or, as rob suggested, as something like ""ice cream in [North America] is just somehow magically better in the US of A."
23: Thanks, urple. I needed that error spelled out to me explicitly, and now I feel daft.
I was on Stanley's side until 23. After the recent onslaught of pedantry over whether we should ever refer to our country as "America", I figured we were now being told not to call it "the U.S.".
We're not allowed to apologize for America, because America can't do bad things. Like accidentally incinerate a bunch of holy books.
Agreed with 19, but perhaps because I'm someone who never craves ice cream or wine unless it's truly excellent. Just putting something vaguely sweet and frozen and milky in my mouth does not do anything for me.
I think the milk around here might be outstanding because it's mostly grass-feeding Amish dairies, minimal processing, and extreme freshness. Irish dairy is also great.
The grass thing might be relevant to the Czech versus UK dairy thing. My wife still talks about the fact that British fields have cows in them.
28: What do Czech fields have in them? Sheep maybe?
French butter is goddamned amazing. It's the best I've ever had, but I'm not taking a position on the Global Butter Wars. I'm sure there's plenty of delicious butter elsewhere.
Berthillon ice cream: Also objectively amazing. Flavor enhanced by eating it on the bridge between Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis.
29: vast mournful herds of potential supermodels waiting to be rounded up and trucked off to Milan.
Toscanini's in Cambridge is the best ice cream I've ever had. For gelato, random streetcorner places in Florence were generally better than anything I've had in the US, but noplace specific.
I still think this is a question that has a technical answer, and speaks to an active bureaucracy. French butter has a minimum butterfat percentage (83? 84?) that is higher than American butterfat (82%). I looked around a little last night and found stuff on managing the protein contents of dairy. I think the answer to why other people notice American milk favorably is that it is incredibly highly regulated, and ag colleges have whole departments studying it. The Dairy Science department at CalPoly had the newest buildings on campus.
Toscanini's isn't even the best ice cream in Cambridge.
Herrell's doesn't exist any more. Christina's is the best ice cream in Cambridge.
Admittedly, I'm living in the 90s. Haven't been back to Cambridge in forever.
I've always been puzzled by why Massachusetts has such extraordinarily good ice cream.
I'd like to try Argentine ice cream.
I'm sure freshness has a lot to do with it, but I'm going to keep arguing (against no one) that the answer isn't terroir so much as regulation.
39: Not to get all market triumphalist, but I think that's got to be competition. You get one or two better than average ice cream places, and they educate the customer base to look for good ice cream, and set a standard to beat. And then it all feeds on itself.
I'm not sure I've ever had Herrells. I like Christina's.
Tosci's is the only ice cream place I've been where the flavors (as opposed to random bits of stuff hurled into the ice cream) are both creative and reliably delicious. Other places, it's either standard flavors, executed better or worse, or interesting flavors that fall short of being wonderful.
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Nope, no making fun of Wilson. There was quite a bit of eye-rolling over people who make too much of group selection, though.
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43: Christina's is like that. My favorite flavor is burnt sugar, but they also have a molasses that's amazing, and some funnier oddball things like Khulfi that are supposed to be very good.
re: 29
Nothing, as far as I can tell. Most livestock are inside in sheds. The UK is like idyllic-happy-animal land by comparison. Even bog-standard English fields always look lush by comparison.
About half the cases in my constitutional law course this semester have been about milk regulation. Okay, maybe not half, but at least 5%, which seems way out of proportion to what I had assumed was the role of dairy products our legal order.
Naw, I think milk regulation was a really big thing for a while. I only half-remember this, but I remember my History of Agribusiness prof saying he could teach a whole class specifically on milk.
Wasn't that largely about TB? I have this vague belief, I think from the James Herriot books, that unpasteurized milk was a huge TB vector, and so it led to very tight dairy regulation.
Also, standards for butterfat, because a consumer can't easily tell the fat content of milk they're buying, or whether it's been watered -- just general consumer fraud stuff.
(I saw the phrase "Circumstantial evidence is a trout in the milk" once, and was mystified by it for years, until I found out that adding water to milk was something dishonest dairies did.)
Herrell's still exists, you just have to go to Northampton. And while there, you can also go to Bart's (It was really funny that Ben and Jerry's was "big corporate ice cream" out there in the crunchier-than-thou valley).
I'm telling you all stop by my brother's ice ream shop some time -- if you're in the PNW send me an e-mail and I'll give you the name, but I feel like posting it would be personally identifying information (not that I really hide my identity but . . .)
"Circumstantial evidence is a trout in the milk"
Like the fish in the coffee pot in Twin Peaks?
I have never been to Toscanini's. I thought it was all hype, but enough people have now praised it that I will go check it out.
I'd like to try Venezualan ice cream.
That shop seems to get written about somewhat regularly; sometime in 2001 or 2002 or thereabouts I read an article about it recording, among its flavors, shredded beef ice cream.
Oh, something like that is mentioned in that article as well.
There were cows in fields everywhere in the eastern European country I visited. They all seemed to be chained in place, so not so idyllic.
Circumstantial evidence is a trout in the milk
Religion is a smile on a dog.
Let's write a tv show that instead of the tired old courtroom routine is set in the glamorous world of milk law! It can have one of those stupid faintly ambivalent participial titles like Milking Amy (well that doesn't sound right!) and serve as a come-back for some third rate actor as a milk lawyer who shoots from the hip.
p.s. Toscanini's's's's burnt sugar ice cream! Shall we say pistols at dawn, Sifu?
We had some pretty scandalous milk in the 19th century.
Also, from this journal article:
Public health reformers and activists of the late 19th century put milk at the top of their agenda.... By the 1880s physicians were convinced that milk containing water and other contaminants was a threat to the nutrition and health of urban dwellers.... Early public health reformers considered milk purity to be the key to lowering rates of infant mortality.... By 1920, milk regulations had reached every part of the country.
Also, relevant to 47, in 1939 milk and milk products were 19% of gross farm revenue.
I'm going to keep arguing (against no one) that the answer isn't terroir so much as regulation.
Yes, but can you regulate the taste of butter eaten atop a baguette that was baked an hour earlier whilst luxuriating on the banks of the Canal Loire on a gorgeous spring day with the cows themselves* lowing in a meadow 10 feet away? You cannot!
*Well, some cows anyway.
We recently started buying Horizon's Lactose-Free Organic 2% milk, and it's weirdly sweet. Addictively sweet. Not quite melted ice cream, but delicious.
YOU CAN NOT LEGISLATE BOVALITY
They replace the missing lactose with glucose, is why.
p.s. Toscanini's's's's burnt sugar ice cream! Shall we say pistols at dawn, Sifu?
I've never actually had Toscanini's version, but Christina's is definitely better.
11, was "soft scoop" "ice cream" due as much to British refrigeration being as good as its plumbing or dentistry of yore, or to the Milk Snatcher [tm]'s employer ?
I read something a hundred years ago about the relative superiority of US ice cream wrt British ice cream. Whatever rando thing I read said something like, the British use all the yummy dairy fats to make better cheese than the States have, leaving their ice creams sadly attenuated. I don't think that makes sense, but certainly British cheese and cream are very good.
68. Soft scoop ice cream was entirely deliberate and with malice aforethought. I'm not sure what the advantage to the manufacturer was (there wasn't any to the customer), but it became ubiquitous from the late 50s to the 80s. Appropriately the efforts of the Thatcher government to undermine working class identity probably contributed to its decline. Which isn't to say you don't still get the shite if you're not fussy about which van you buy your ice cream off.
28, 29: So you're saying that the presence of cows is the key to making high-quality milk?
That makes sense to me. I doubt that any extant artificial process can convert grass to milk as well as the cow.
Cows grazing in a meadow=lots of shit in various stages of affinage, lots of flies, and stinging nettles everywhere. Idyllic? Opinions differ. What is really wonderful is same day but chilled milk on a hot day on a high alpine meadow (aka 'alpage' - the Alps are literally grazing areas) from some local cowherd. Don't think too hard about the sanitation procedures employed in getting the milk from the shit covered udders into the grimy dented milk keg.
72: Maybe it's the absence of stinging nettles that makes US milk so yummy.
BTW, one of the wrongest things McMegan ever said (a really high bar to clear) is that organic milk is indistinguishable from the regular stuff. I'd say the difference approaches apple juice/apple cider in scale. When I drink conventional milk, I drink whole; when I drink organic, I'm happy with 2%, and have even resorted to 1% without minding.
I've never been to the US so never had US ice-cream, but the best ice-cream I've ever had has been in Scotland. That is, from the various old-school Italian places that still do the whole 'beating/stretching with a big wooden paddle' type stuff.
The ice-cream in Jaconelli's, for example, was excellent:
http://russelldavies.typepad.com/eggbaconchipsandbeans/2005/04/cafe_djaconelli.html
Do they deep fry the ice cream in Scotland, as they do pizza?
We recently started buying Horizon's Lactose-Free Organic 2% milk
Ixnay on Orizonhay, at least if you have a good alternative, according to local family farm advocate M/tch. They're big and bossie (see what I did right there?) and pressure farmers on pricing. Whereas, say, Organic Valley is a farmer-owned coop.
coop s/b co-op. Or maybe Koop. Good ole C. Everett.
Maybe it's a farmer-owned coupe. Like a sporty little Honda Civic that the farmer drives around in, peddling his delicious milk.
75: Deep-fried icecream is an Asian restaurant thing, at least in NY. Never very good.
I've never been to the US
Will you come if we hold a giant meetup with knife fights?
Let's have it in Boston so I can try this burnt sugar ice cream everyone is on about.
76: The only organic lactose-free milk that HEB carries here is Horizon and Mootopia. Before Hokey Pokey got the shits, we used to try to do better-organic companies, but the lactose thing is tricky.
I am under the impression that Horizon is the poster child for everything that could possibly be wrong with the organic certification standards. Bad* environmental practices, bad* farmer-side practices, bad* animal welfare practices, absolutely minimal technical compliance with the certification standards (in letter rather than in spirit whenever and wherever that will save a penny), etc. I'm sure I read this all somewhere once.
* By which I mean only marginally if at all better than "conventional."
80: What? Deep-fried ice cream is a Mexican thing, here in the authentic heartland.
84: It's a Chi-Chi's thing, which is not at all the same as a Mexican thing.
I don't think I've ever had lactose-free milk, but it sounds like an abomination. Have soy milk and rice milk and coconut milk and almond milk all been rejected as alternatives?
Oh, and catching up:
Shall we say pistols at dawn, Sifu?
We can say it. I don't know what it means, but we can say it.
I would put in a plug here for the ice cream from the dairy institute at UW-Madison, except that the one time I got some, it had a hair in it, which soured me on the experience, despite the ice cream being pretty decent. Is "soft-scoop" the same as "soft-serve"? Because I think technically around here DQ is serving "soft-serve ice milk" due to Big Butterfat-led regulations.
Despite the strong dairying tradition of both the region and my family, I am not really that picky about ice cream. The major market premium brands are usually just fine with me. Ben & Jerry's is okay, although now that they are completely corporate, you might as well just buy Breyer's or something.
Have soy milk and rice milk and coconut milk and almond milk all been rejected as alternatives?
Soy milk, we're wary of because soy acts like estrogen, and there's already all the breast cancer stuff. (My thinking is very mushy on this, though.)
Rice/coconut/almond: at least some of these tend to be low-fat, and our pediatrician is really big on toddlers getting enough fat.
Also, lactose-free isn't that creepy - they just add an enzyme (lactase?) that breaks down the lactose. You can buy lactase and add it yourself, but we never got it thoroughly broken down enough for Pokey's digestive tract.
Ben & Jerry's is okay, although now that they are completely corporate, you might as well just buy Breyer's or something Jimmy Fallon has his own flavor, it's totally jumped the shark.
You know what's awful? Buying a not-pint of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and discovering that you got the runt of the litter, so to speak, and there are only about 4 little balls of cookie dough in it. Goddamn it!
For all the shrug-inducing novelty flavors they've created, people may say what they like about Ben & Jerry's but the company that created Chunky Monkey can never really die.
Bonaroo Buzz! It has coffee and whiskey in it! (Okay, whiskey caramel, but still.)
83: So I should switch to Nature's Promise?
94.last is both true and begs for some kind of joke involving Danny & the Juniors. Stanley?
"Begs" may be an overstatement. "Makes me picture the record sleeve from the Grease soundtrack" is more on target.
"Begs" may be an overstatement. "Makes me picture the record sleeve from the Grease soundtrack" is more on target.
Chunky Monkey tastes vastly better when it's eaten in an actual ice cream parlor, as described in detail in that seminal doo-wop hit, "At the Shoppe".
It's a Chi-Chi's thing, which is not at all the same as a Mexican thing.
Next you're going to tell me that baked Alaska isn't an Inuit thing.
43/45: Humphry Slocombe/Bi-Rite FTW.
Clearly we need to schedule a transcontinental ice cream faceoff.
103 The Inuit have not even one word for baked Alaska.
"Inuit" isn't really an Alaska thing, so there's a certain symmetry there.
I've gotten weirdly picky about organic milk. Ultra-pasteurized milk tastes bad; I'll take conventional over organic to get merely pasteurized milk (Sometimes I can do both, like with Maine's Own Organic, or the Organic Valley "farmer-owned" sub-brand).
But I've also ben making my own ice cream. The chocolate ice cream was basically frozen cocoa pudding made with a couple of awesome 70% dark chocolate bars. It's a good thing it's a lot of work to make that stuff.
I recently made some seriously delicious cinnamon ice cream.
I spent all day in a field with cows & thistles. Nice enough, but not idyllic. Not a dairy herd, though. Last dairy gossip I heard was that milk is priced by its solids, & with high-tech monitoring dairies can arbitrage feed through the cow.
Premium brand American ice cream is pretty great stuff, really: it's made with full-fat milk and real cream.
Canadian ice cream can't even come close: too much air whipped into the mix for cheap volume, and too many skimmed milk products (likewise with many US lesser brands, of course: but the point is that the US has a premium level that sets the standard).
Canadian butter is better, though, imho: not as oily, and just tastes more "dairy."
87: Catching up.
Does this come out, from dry cleaning, or is it like chocolate ice cream gravy?
You know what tastes good? Ice cream.
Do they deep fry the ice cream in Scotland, as they do pizza?
Yes they do, and there was a film about it with Bill Paterson - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087072/ - which is kind of light hearted but based on the real-life and very serious Glasgow Ice Cream Wars of the 1980s.