Truly, this is the apotheosis of food science, for better or worse. Which is not something to complain about, so long as you don’t mind the fact that you’re eating no fewer than six forms of sugar. In terms of flavor, again, what you have here is more or less a very cold candy bar. The almond milk base is quite creamy and melts nicely - of all of the nondairy ice creams I tried, it came closest to approximating dairy ice cream. Also like the original, it is very, very difficult to stop eating. I went for Phish Food like the original, it is chocolate ice cream mixed with marshmallow and caramel swirls and fudge fish. Like their dairy counterparts, the brand’s certified-vegan nondairy line, which it launched in 2016, plays to B&J’s primary strength, which is making ice cream that is more or less a deconstructed candy bar. And why would they - going to B&J’s for vanilla is like going to a steakhouse for salad. Like Jeni’s, Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t do nondairy vanilla. That said, it was overall pretty satisfying. Also, in my pint, at least, there weren’t enough wafer bits (or “vanilla wafer gravel,” as it’s appealingly called on the ingredients list). The flavor, on the other hand, is a bit artificial it tastes less like banana than food science’s idea of banana. ![]() Jeni’s makes its nondairy base from coconut cream, which here creates a very good, creamy texture with nice melt. Known for its creative flavors, Jeni’s doesn’t offer anything as pedestrian as a dairy-free vanilla the closest I could find was its banana cream pudding. I ate a lot of it so you hopefully won’t have to. ![]() Again, there is a lot of bad vegan and nondairy ice cream out there. This is less a traditional shopping guide than a public service announcement. While some may argue this creates an uneven playing field, I believe that important attributes like texture and flavor can be improved upon only so much if you’re not working from a decent base. When I couldn’t find vanilla, I bought whatever flavor I could find. When possible, I tested each brand’s vanilla flavor, since vanilla is arguably the best test of a brand’s basic competence. (Refined white sugar, a major ingredient in many ice creams, is typically processed using animal byproducts.) One other bit of potentially confounding (and telling) terminology is that a lot of brands call their products “frozen desserts” rather than ice cream. It is also not a guide to only certified-vegan ice creams - while everything on here is nondairy, a number of brands use the terms “nondairy” and “vegan” interchangeably, so those who are strict vegans need to do a bit more digging to make sure certain products are certified as such. While I tried 17 brands in the course of my research, this is not a comprehensive guide to every vegan and nondairy ice cream on the market. But quantity, alas, does not necessarily mean quality: It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that an awful lot of vegan ice cream tastes like it was made by people who hate vegans.Īs someone who has eaten my fair share of vegan ice cream, I set out to try to distinguish the good from the bad and the very, very strange. ![]() Big, non-vegan ice cream companies have gotten in on the game, as have grocery store brands and a myriad of start-ups. There is now enough vegan ice cream on the market that those of us who avoid dairy for whatever reason now have exponentially more choices than we did even five years ago. If you want to measure how much the landscape of packaged vegan foods has changed, vegan ice cream makes a good yardstick.
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