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December 2005

Product Reviews / Main Nibbles / Desserts

Graeter’s Ice Cream

A Starlet In The Heartland

If you live in Cincinnati, Columbus, or Dayton, Ohio; a few towns in Kentucky; or in New Albany, Indiana: lucky you! You can simply drive over to one of 36 Graeter’s stores and and pick up some of their rich premium ice cream. But given the price of gas these days, it may not cost that much more for the rest of us to have it shipped.

And so we, who live in New York, are enjoying our second holiday shipment of Graeter’s Ice Cream. The first, for Thanksgiving, delivered an incredibly rich and chewy Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream with an egg custard base and spiced so nicely, the actual pie we had for Thanksgiving dinner was disappointing. The Apple Cider Sorbet was as if someone had put a cinnamon stick in farmstead cider and made a granita.  Please don’t picket us, but no retailer we found in New York made holiday ice cream this good.

Graeter’s, one of the oldest continuously family-owned ice cream makers in the country, has been pleasing crowds in the Queen City since 1870. The fourth generation of the Graeter family uses the same egg custard recipes and the small batch method of production. Graeter’s calls it the “French Pot Process,” and it has gotten a lot of play. We have been unable to find a culinary reference to a “French pot” technique of ice cream preparation outside of Graeter’s (although the term does exist as an old technique in the distillation of rum). Graeter’s themselves refers to their custom-designed French Pot machinery as a vertical batch freezer, and process seems not significantly different from other small batch methods that create high density ice creams with low overrun (a low percentage of air whipped in). Where a typical pint of ice cream can weigh as little as eight ounces, notes Graeter’s, one of their pints weighs nearly a full pound. And you’ll also notice the difference in calorie counts: that other pint is about 170 calories a 4-ounce serving, whereas a Graeter’s pint runs 260 to 290 calories (this is the same with other artisan ice creams, as well as with Häagen-Dazs).  Net net, “French Pot process” makes for good marketing, but it’s nothing arcane. Small batch processing is a concept known to everyone who makes artisanal products, as well as to home cooks and bakers. For reasons of chemistry not yet understood, foods made in small batches are far superior in taste. Try to quadruple the recipe, and something gets lost in translation—whether it’s ice cream, toffee, cake or spaghetti sauce. So, what’s so great about Graeter’s?
	The two-gallon “French Pot,” above, churning ice cream. Below,molten chocolate is added. It chills and shatters to create chocolate “chips.”

Graeter’s hovers at the edge of potential greatness. Some flavors are superb, some are over-the-top (which is good are bad depending on how you like it), some are just average, like a good supermarket ice cream. Not being a local, we were forced to make a choice of a ten flavors—we wish we could have had all twenty-three. But we saw enough in each group to be able to see the clear delineations. 

The line consists of:

• 7 Original Flavors: Black Cherry, Butter Pecan, Caramel, Chocolate, Cookies and Cream, Strawberry, Vanilla
• 10 Signature Flavors: Black Raspberry Chip, Buckeye Blitz, Chocolate Chip, Coconut Chip, Cookie Dough Chip, Mint Chocolate Chip, Mocha Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter Chip, Toffee Chip
• 3 Sorbets: Lemon, Raspberry, Strawberry
• Seasonal Flavors: Currently Cinnamon, Egg Nog & Peppermint; last month Apple Cider Sorbet & Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream

Perhaps the most differentiating feature of Graeter’s is the Signature Flavors. Chocolate chip is a misnomer: these are not even chocolate chunks. We would call them chocolate slabs. As you can see in the photo above, liquid semisweet chocolate is poured into the ice cream as it’s being churned. The chocolate freezes and is shattered into large, irregular pieces—some thick, some thin, some as large as a quarter. A common result is to find yourself with a mouthful of ice cream and chocolate, as if you had popped a piece of chocolate bar in your mouth along with your favorite flavor and are chewing on the chocolate as the ice cream melts. 

This is certainly the most memorable chocolate chip ice cream we’ve ever had. Mint Chocolate Chip was like a chocolate nugget field.  At first, we were enthralled, but four pints of Signature Flavors later we were tired. Perhaps it was too much of a good thing—most people don’t eat four pints of ice cream in a week. But we had signed up for ice cream, not chocolate bar and ice cream. We love excess, but this excess is...excessive. We think if we lived in Graeter’s territory, we would prefer it as an occasional rather than a daily treat.

There are over-the-top flavors to match the excess of chocolate. The company’s number one seller is a vivid Black Raspberry Chip: redolent of raspberry puree, it looks exactly like the photo at the right, and delivers big mouthfuls of chocolate “chips.” This ice cream goes with nothing—just try to serve it with a piece of pie! It even gives the plain cone a run for its money: it demands all the attention for itself. We liked it for its boldness, although given  our choice of a second pint, we might have repaired to the finesse of Spotted Dog Creamery’s Blackberry Chip—a slightly different berry, a much more elegant experience.

Graeter’s number one flavor is Black Raspberry Chip.

Like an actor who sometimes turns in a great performance, sometimes an enjoyable performance, and sometimes just phones it in, Graeter’s doesn’t play with consistency. Some flavors, like Black Raspberry Chip, chew the scenery; some like Cinnamon and the Apple Cider Sorbet, are elegantly articulated. Others, like Egg Nog, use enough artificial flavor to cross over from artist to artist manque; and Chocolate and Vanilla are so ordinary as to not belong in the same troupe. The variability can be summed up as follows:

Graeter’s pursues small batch production yet mixes artificial with natural flavors. It promotes expensive, labor-intensive techniques and hand-makes chocolate chips, adding a ton of them to the Signature Flavors; yet it eschews basic artisanal techniques like infusing its mint flavors with fresh mint, opting for ordinary peppermint. Thus, it ends up with flavors that are half-there. Peppermint, a seasonal flavor, had large chunks of candy cane but lacked real mint oomph; the beautiful pink color was smoke and mirrors. Mint Chocolate Chip had an over-generous amount of chocolate “chips” but the mint ice cream was undistinguished.

Where do we stand on Graeter’s?  Ice cream lovers should definitely get to know it. After all, it has been called “the best ice cream in America” by some reviewers. While we think such absolutes are silly (and products so touted rarely if ever make our own list of favorites), every company does some things very well. Graeter’s has proven that it can create truly sublime flavors.  We just need to catch the actor in the right roles.

For our next Graeter’s outing, we’ll check out the highly-recommended Caramel, as well as the Butter Pecan—Oprah and Steadman’s favorite flavor. And a few more on the program we haven’t yet decided upon. We hope to be able to add more bravos! at curtain call.

Learn more about ice cream:

Everybody Loves Ice Cream: The Whole Scoop on America’s Favorite Treat, by Shannon Jackson Arnold is a travel book, a cookbook, and a pop culture history all in one. Whether you’re looking for a great ice cream stand nearby, a recipe for rocky road, or what makes an ice cream "superpremium," you’ll find it here. $13.59. Click here to purchase or for more information.	The Banana Split Book: Everything There Is To Know About America’s Favorite Dessert, by Michael Turback. A tribute to the 100-year-old ice cream concoction in this collection of trivia, recipes, quotes and photos. Despite Turback’s lighthearted tone and subject matter, this is actually a well-researched and fact-filled reference. $10.17. Click here to purchase or for more information.	A Month of Sundaes, by Michael Turback. A historical book about ice cream, with sundae lore and recipes spread throughout. Follow the history of ice cream in America, from Thomas Jefferson to today’s titans like Ben & Jerry’s. A book for the ice cream obsessed. $19.95. Click here to purchase or for more information.

To enjoy ice cream at home:

Glass Waffle-Pattern Dish, for sundaes or to serve designer ice cream cones. In Amber, blue & purple, it’s 6-1/2" tall and comes with an extra-long stainless steel ice cream spoon. $9.00 each. Click here to purchase or for more information.	Ice Cream Sandwich Maker. Take your favorite cookies, your favorite ice cream, and create...heaven.  $15.99.  Click here to purchase or for more information.	Cuisinart Supreme Ice Cream Maker ICE 50BC. Unless you want to spring for the Musso 4080 Lussino Dessert Maker at twice the price, this is the best ice cream maker you can buy. $248.95. Click here to purchase or for more information.

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