In today’s reality of social distancing, opportunities for respite are few and far between. Sporting events have been cancelled, as have shows and concerts, and much of society is dreading boredom even more than the deadly virus. Of course, despite the circumstances, one must fight onward, maintaining as much normalcy as viable and pursuing recreational activities that remain legal and safe. And so gastronomic adventures — long important — have now become truly paramount.
So, on one recent evening, I decided to pursue a leisure activity I had long been relishing in more ways than one, and fulfill one of the goals laid out in this site’s manifesto: providing our readership with ice cream reviews.
After the short, uneventful journey to the kind of formulaic chain supermarket that dots the secondary highways of much of America, I sanitized my shopping cart and walked through the automatic doors of the front entrance, bringing myself within striking distance of my target.
Upon entering the store, what I saw was familiar, if, in a certain non-literal, non-figurative and non-true sense, exhilarating. The towers of fruits and vegetables, the intensely loud background hubbub endemic to the supermarket — all of this might have been typical, but it might also have represented some sort of existential self-diminution related to the greater pursuit of ice cream reviews. Nah.
Glossing over a slew of purchases for the literary sake of pretending this supermarket run was solely about ice cream, I eased my way to the freezers, poised and ready to decide what delectable dessert would shortly be finding its way down my hatch.
Five-paragraph digression: If you’ve seen a standard American supermarket, you’ve likely observed the pedestal on which ice cream is held. I’ve been to supermarkets in several regions of the country, and they tend to be pretty similar. Their sizes range from large to colossal; their decor, from drab to dreary. Bakeries and deli counters often fill the corners and sides, respectively, while every sort of jell-o and marinara sauce known to mankind dots most of the aisles.
And then there are the frozen aisles. As one would assume from the topic of this article, I tend to enjoy my encounters with ice cream. But the quantity of ice cream and the cornucopia of choices is nothing short of overwhelming.
“Sure,” you’re thinking to yourself, “maybe ice cream is somewhat over-represented in the supermarket.”
But that’s not what I said, and I wish you’d stop tempering my points. The amount and variety of ice cream is not “somewhat over-represented” — it is staggering. Do us both a favor. Next time you’re in a supermarket (and it is safe), go to the bread or refrigerated milk section of the store, and see how much shelf space is devoted to those staples. Then go see how room is allocated to ice cream.
I mean, there’s an ice cream aisle. Paper towel is bulky and in high demand, but it doesn’t get its own aisle! Bread doesn’t get its own aisle. But ice cream does.
OK, I’m back at the freezers. Prone as I am to overthinking, it’s good I made a quick, rash decision on what to purchase. When it comes to ice cream, there are many good options and many factors to consider; sometimes you simply have to take the plunge.
I went with Haagen Dazs Triple Chocolate Trio Crispy Layers – an option I had never sampled, but which seemed, on brief study, to be a good fit. Just exotic enough to be interesting without trying too hard. As I put the pint into my cart, my mouth began watering in anticipation, I would write, except I’m pretty sure it didn’t.
Without getting bogged down in details, I did not eat the ice cream immediately, instead waiting until roughly an hour after I got home.
After pulling the container from the freezer and opening it, the ice cream was finally sitting in front of me, ready to be savored. Digging into the container with a spoon, I could immediately tell this would be an ice cream adventure like none I had ever experienced.
As it turned out, this Haagen Dazs creation is unique in its composition. Also containing dark ice cream and light ice cream, perhaps the true differentiator was the third ingredient: Belgian chocolate layers. Laid horizontally across the pint container, the Belgian chocolate had real substance. It wasn’t quite hard to cut through with my spoon, but I knew darn well that I wasn’t cutting through cream.
Putting spoon to lip, the rich black and white seemed to meld together in a sumptuous combination that was rich, very creamy and not exactly hard on the palate, if you catch my drift. The Belgian. chocolate was quite good, but a comparative afterthought. One might describe it as somewhat brittle, but not in an unpleasant way — a cocoa-laden crunch amid a current of half-frozen cream.
Before further analysis of the ice cream, a couple of caveats are warranted. One, I’m not at all sure of this, but the nature of the ice cream may have been impacted a bit by my handling. I A) bought it; B) put it in my home freezer; and C) ate it. I don’t know what the recommended time lag is between A and B, but I can’t be sure I didn’t exceed it, or that the time between B and C was sufficient. Two, in a classy publication like The Classic W, I don’t think I have to apologize for not eating ice cream from the container, but the fact is that I didn’t; I spooned it out of the pint container and ate it from a cup.
While the ice cream was excellent, one might even say a veritable breath of fresh air in an interminable global experience, there were a couple of seeming imperfections. You may have noticed that I referred to the two ice cream components as “dark” and “light” and not “chocolate” and “vanilla.” In fact, the Haagen Dazs website makes no reference to vanilla, speaking instead of “white chocolate” and “milk chocolate.”
As someone who ate it, I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were, and therein lies the problem. While the two ice cream flavors certainly meshed harmoniously, they also meshed entirely. I found myself unable to isolate one from the other and was forced to savor a delectable symphony without the ability to appreciate the contributions of each element.
The Belgian chocolate was, no doubt, very good, but it left me a bit mystified. As I ate it, I thought I encountered two layers of it, and it seemed that one was thicker than the other. The graphic on the Haagen Dazs website, on the other hand, shows a pint container with four layers, all of similar thickness.
Now, it’s possible that, as I spooned it out, two of the layers moved close to one another, and, in the process, fooled me into thinking they were one, thicker layer; I have no way of knowing whether that was actually the case. Now, there is no telling, because the ice cream is done. For that matter, so is my review.
The Classic W 