Whether swirled into a cone, scooped on top of a warm brownie, or sandwiched in between cookies, vanilla ice cream is every dessert’s a la mode companion, the glue of summertime, and statistically, the most popular ice cream flavor in the US. However, as we meander down the frozen aisle and browse our store’s selection of ice cream, we hit a wall – which brand is the best to choose? Before you start worrying, we here did the heavy lifting for you and tested the five top brands to see which vanilla ice cream is the cream of the crop.
What We Looked For In An Ice Cream
We taste tested five different brands of vanilla ice cream. Here’s what we looked for:
Flavor: The first characteristic is a no-brainer but certainly required – vanilla flavor. How strong is the vanilla? Can the vanilla be tasted easily? Do we taste vanilla, or is it just cold milk flavor?
Texture: You can discern a good quality ice cream based on its texture. Is it smooth and creamy? Or is it brittle and crystallized? Though texture and density can share many traits, texture is a real make or break quality and transforms eating into an experience. Texture can be the tipping point, either making the ice cream a dream or a nightmare to eat.
Richness: The heaviness of an ice cream indicates our ability to eat a lot or a little of it, and depending on the dessert you’re going to make, you may actually want a less dense ice cream. Though we love our food to be decadent and rich, there’s a balance between being dense and feeling like we’re eating straight-up heavy cream that sits like a bag of quarters in our stomachs.
And here are the results, ranked from worst to best:
5. Store Brand… If In A Literal Penny Pinch
Wakefern Food Corp is the private label manufacturer for five regional supermarkets on the Eastern seaboard. Though Shop Rite’s brand Bowl & Basket is still regionally specific, it’s worth putting this brand’s ice cream to the test. Many grocery stores have sales on store-brand items, so it’s good to know if pinching pennies is worth it or not.
Taste: The vanilla flavor is present, but it comes on strong and goes very quickly. Looking at the milk fat content it’s easy to see why this would happen, fats stick to the tongue and allow the vanilla flavor to settle into the taste receptors of the tongue. Without enough cream or fat to keep the flavor lingering, the flavor quickly disappears.
Texture: Straight out of the freezer, it was sort of brittle, but as it softened up, it got easier to handle and had a smooth texture. However, the softened state did not compensate for the overall crystalized, grainy texture.
Richness: This was the lightest of the ice creams, however, it didn’t have any hefty denseness.
Price: The price was the lowest of them all, pricing at $2.50 for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
4. Breyers… If You Don’t Like It Creamy
The green leaf of the Breyer logo hung over many 20th-century ice cream stores and was a ubiquitous sign of creamy fresh Philadelphia-made ice cream. Now the ice cream has gone through some PR problems, like being sued for not actually having vanilla beans in their vanilla bean ice cream, but they’ve pivoted and tried to go back to simpler ingredients, just like in the beginning.
Taste: It has a consistent vanilla flavor, however, it is not the most complex vanilla flavor, and doesn’t have those signature floral notes of vanilla. Similar to Friendly’s ice cream, you only taste the vanilla after the cream.
Texture: The texture of this ice cream was the oddest of the brands. Initially, the texture was pliable and super easy to scoop out, but as it softened it got a weird, glue-like gloopy thickness. As we ate it more, the creaminess turned more into wateriness. There was only a small window of time when the texture tasted right.
Richness: This ice cream was neither very creamy nor very light. It was one of the lighter tasting ice creams, which made it very easy to eat a lot of it without much thought but when you tasted it, it tasted more like ice milk than ice cream. If you want to make an ice cream cake or an ice cream pie, it’s a good ice cream to use.
Price: Moderate. Depending on the store it ranged from $4.99 to $5.19 for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
3. Friendly’s… Most Affordable Creamy Ice Cream
Two brothers in Massachusetts saw an opportunity during America’s toughest downturn and opened a restaurant in 1935 selling double scoops of ice cream for an affordable 5 cents. Friendly’s has gone and is still going through many bankruptcies, but this company’s ice cream has been, and remained, in stores since 1989.
Flavor: The first thing you taste is milk followed by a fast flash of vanilla. Though the base has a yolky yellow hue, it doesn’t have a custard flavor. With each spoonful, you got the same sequence of flavors: milk, vanilla, sweet.
Texture: This ice had a creamy middle-of-the-road texture. It always felt a little stiff to lick and to get a spoonful of the ice cream, you had to dig into it!
Richness: It’s easy, almost too easy to eat a lot of this ice cream. Where it doesn’t succeed in vanilla flavor, it passes with easy eat-ability. It’s neither light nor heavy, so this ice cream is addictive to eat!
Price: Similar to Breyers, it was moderately priced, if not a little cheaper ranging anywhere from $3.20 to $5 for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
2. Haagen-Dazs… Rich But With A Cost
Haagen-Dazs is not as old nor as foreign as one might think. In the 1960s, two Polish immigrants selling ice cream at their relatives’ Bronx lemon ice shop came up with a fake Danish-sounding name but ignored Danish pronunciation rules. This ice cream has a fancy reputation, but does it hold up to such high expectations?
Flavor: Surprisingly, it doesn’t have a very strong vanilla taste, though out of all of the ice creams, the vanilla flavor lasts the longest on the tongue. However, for a more robust, in-your-face vanilla flavor, their vanilla bean ice cream would be a better buy.
Texture: It has a great texture, velvety and smooth, not separating as it softens. When it did soften, it had the consistency of soft serve ice cream.
Richness: Of all of the ice creams tested, it was the richest. The ice cream tasted as if it had a lot of milk fats in the base, making for a decadent dessert experience. Haagen-Das was creamy, never having any crystalized or granular grittiness, it was smooth in all states of hard, softened, and melted.
Price: High. Ranging anywhere from mid $4.50 to over $5 for just 14 ounces, it was the most money per ounce.
1. Perry’s… The Goldilocks of Vanillas
Perry’s has been run and operated by the same family for four generations in a town outside of Buffalo New York. Perry’s accounts for a small portion of the ice cream aisle, but they dominate most of the hard ice cream sold at ice cream stands or retail shops spanning from New England and as far as eastern Ohio.
Flavor: There is a strong vanilla flavor, without being sweet. Like Friendly’s ice cream, it had a yolky color which may or may not have added to a placebo perception of an intense vanilla taste. But out of all of the ice creams, it had the strongest natural vanilla flavoring.
Texture: This is one of the richer of the ice creams, and is easy to soften, but it melted into almost a thick and luscious cream sauce (which is never a bad thing, it tasted equally as delicious and could be a great cream sauce with a slice of pie). Outside of the Haagen-Dazs, it was one of the smoothest of the ice creams tested.
Richness: This ice cream is rich, but unlike the Haagen-Dazs, it wasn’t too creamy. It borders the line on being creamy, but not uncomfortably rich.
Price: This was the second most expensive brand pricing at $6 or over for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
There you have it! Perry’s takes first place. Here’s our ranking for each category.
Flavor: Perry’s, Haagen-Dazs, Breyer’s, Friendly’s, Store Brand
Texture: Perry’s, Haagen-Dazs, Friendly’s, Breyers, Store Brand
Richness: Haagen-Dazs, Perry’s Friendly’s, Breyers, Store Brand
Price (cheapest to most expensive): Store Brand, Friendly’s, Breyers, Perry’s, Haagen-Dazs
What’s your favorite vanilla ice cream?
