My local grocery store has started stocking a “limited edition” apple pie ice cream (message me for the details, don’t want to be shilling). It’s one of my favorites – not only does it have chunks of real apple and graham cracker crust, but the ice cream itself has a delicious apple flavor. The whole thing tastes like you took a slice of apple pie with vanilla ice cream and blended it chunky style.
I always figured there was some boring food-science reason you couldn’t make a decent apple ice cream, but this shows it’s perfectly possible. So why isn’t it more common? Apple pie is one of the most popular deserts, and you find apple flavoring in plenty of drinks and candies. What gives?
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Because it’s too expensive to crunch up a whole iPhone just for one cone.
This should be higher. Even broken iPhones from 3 years ago sell for tens or hundreds of euros.
Making ice cream with actual apples involved is a nightmare due to acidity influencing other ingredients. But making it apple-scented is trivial.
But you raised a very good question…
I feel like dehydrated apples might work.
The cream would rehydrate them.
This is why you dry the ice cream first.
TIL
Are we talking Apple or apple pie? Because from your post I can’t really tell.
What flavour is apple pie?
Apple + cinnamon
And brown sugar.
Gotta get those cinnamons-syrup-swirls, amirite?
And cheddar, ya philistines.
+ butter
So pie. And baked apple doesn’t taste like raw apple.
This particular one is apple pie, but the ice cream itself (minus the pie crust chunks) would be great on its own.
I’ve recently had a similar discussion on why orange ice cream isn’t that popular, but exists in form of water ice
Our conclusion was that acidic flavors, like orange and apple just aren’t good combined with cream, instead being better served as a sorbet
What about orange creamsicles?
That sort of goes along with his point. The orange part is separate from the cream part.
Orange creamcicle flavored ice cream is pretty easy to find. But I think it’s usually vanilla ice cream with layers of orange sherbet. Strawberries are acidic and strawberry ice cream is a popular flavor.
In my experience, apples just don’t taste very good when frozen. Maybe that’s why they don’t sell frozen apples at most supermarkets?
I make ice cream as a hobby and found orange ice cream is too rich to eat even a scoop in one sitting. It’s completely possible but it’s hard to eat.
I had this delightful tangerine sorbet. a golfball scoop is all we needed
Yup. Sorbet is often made with orange or lemon flavours.
you’d end up with apple cider vinegar as your flavorant, and that doesn’t play well with milk.
What, you don’t like cold soured apple curd tart cream? It has nutmeg in it!
Where do you live? Where I live (Austria), apple ice cream is maybe not 100% universally available at all ice cream vendors, but common enough that I have no problems getting it if I want to.
Southeastern US. This is my first time seeing apple-anything ice cream on the shelves, from major national brands at least.
Hm. I rarely buy ice cream in stores so I am not sure whether there is apple ice cream in stores here, but at ice cream parlors it is definitely reasonably common here.
Cinnamon apple jelly should be more common too! (Not apple butter… fuck Apple butter).
Apple cinnamon all the things!
Glazed apple cinnamon doughnuts are the best
I’ve never tried one, but now it seems I have to.
While you’re there try the Apple Fritter! It’s like monkey bread* made with apple cinnamon bits, then deep fried and dipped in glaze.
*=Monkey Bread is just pull-apart bread made from large chunks of dough.
Forget apple, we need more banana/banana creme ice cream flavors.
Even better, bananas foster flavor
It’s a popular flavor in new england. Gifford’s has apple pie seasonally at their ice cream stands. They also have pumpkin pie ice cream which is my favorite.
I’ve wondered about the same but with kiwi fruit it’s delicious and refreshing yet you don’t see any flavored drinks or ice cream with that flavor.
Kiwi and pineapples have enzyme to break proteins down, causing it taste better if they have contact to diary products long enough. Canned pineapples don’t have this issue but I haven’t seen canned kiwi, maybe that explains no kiwi ice cream
Maybe. I have seen pineapple flavored drinks though
In the US we have a lot of strawberry kiwi flavored drinks. Rarely just kiwi by itself though.
I’d drink it. Still just kiwi would be great imho
I suspect it’s related to the difficulty in processing. Kiwi fruit are quite small and non-trivial to extract the flesh from. This would make it more expensive to extract.
This is less of an issue now that a few decades back. However, most people are quite conservative on their juice choices. Low sales still mean higher cost, which reduces sales.
damn good question
Apples turn brown when you freeze them.
While that is the case, modern industrial ice cream rarely contains the actual fruit. Just take standard Neutro mix, regenerate it with water, not milk, and add some food coloring (a light green), an acidic component like citric acid, and “natural” “apple” flavor.
Little boutique place near us has an “Apple Cheddar Pie” ice cream in the fall. It’s never quite as good as you expect. Gotta try it again this year, to see how they’ve changed it.
(On the other hand, their Lemon Curd Blueberry is one of the greatest things ever served in a cone in the history of humankind.)
There is such a variety of apples it’s hard to pick one apple flavor.
I really wish I had one of those fancy ice cream makers like they have on cooking shows like Iron Chef because I would definitely see what happens if you tried to make apple ice cream. I don’t know if I can get fancier than just basic ingredients with mine… Maybe if I made an apple compote? 🤔
I think it just works better making apple pie ala mode ice cream Cold Stone style with some vanilla ice cream, pie filling, graham cracker crust and caramel.
Do you have a
KitchenAidstand mixer or anything like that? Best thing I ever learned is making ice cream with dry ice. I just put the base in the mixer, start it with the paddle, and start putting in crushed up dry ice, one spoonful at a time. I managed to get dry ice in the little cubes or pellets, put it in a cloth sack, and then use a hammer or blunt object to break it up into small pieces.lol I was just thinking this would work while I was walking my dogs because I realized I don’t even have a regular ice cream machine anymore.
What happened to your O
It’s spinning.
