Graeters: Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip & Summer Peach

Prepare yourselves! This is going to be a long post.  My wonderful French Horn and high school marching band teacher asked if I would review Graeter's ice cream on the blog.  This is a new-to-me brand based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I *think* I've seen Graeter's in grocery store freezers before and not bought any because I was kind of turned off by the name.  Graeter's is a good, German last name and there's no reason it should bring anything to mind other than delicious dessert, but to me Graeter's sounds like it should be the name of a dive bar.

I looked on Graeter's website, http://www.graeters.com/, to see where I could buy this ice cream in Minneapolis, and the most convenient place for me was the Whole Foods in downtown Minneapolis.  I went in on Thursday night after a dance class, skipped over to the freezers, found the Graeter's and then froze when I saw the price.  I was planning to pick up a pint of the Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip, Graeter's "all-time best selling flavor," and pick out one more pint to try.  The price of Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip was $7.99.  Yes $7.99 for a pint of ice cream.  Hrrrggghhhhhh.  As I overcame my initial shock and reached into the freezer I thought to myself, "There is no turning back now, this is the life I have chosen!"

In addition to the Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip, I grabbed a pint of Summer Peach, a limited-edition flavor, going at the low, low rate of $5.97.

I took the bus home from Whole Foods, and had to stand with the two pints in a paper bag that was about the right size for a bottle of Colt 45.  So I'm pretty sure everyone on my bus thought I was a drunk because I was simultaneously trying to stretch (read: falling all over myself) and gazing longingly into my Colt 45 bag.

Now, on to the ice cream!  First up I have the Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip.  Graeter's schtick is their chocolate chips.  On their website they have three categories of ice cream: Signature Chip, Limited Edition, and Less Indulgent.  Man, oh man let me tell you about these chips!  They are huge.  I had one chocolate chip that was the size of a bite size candy bar.  That's not a chocolate chip, it's a freaking chocolate tectonic plate!

Sometimes, chocolate chips in ice cream are just hard and frozen and not good, but somehow these chips were chewy and gooey.  How do they do it!? It's sorcery!  The ice cream itself was also amazing.  Normally the denser the ice cream, the better, but the texture of the Graeter's was almost fluffy.  Imagine chocolate mousse, but three times as dense and frozen.  Ah-mazing.

Graeter's makes small batch ice cream freezing only 2.5 gallons at a time and then hand packing the pints.  You can watch a video showing their process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmWmNhOLC9Y.  In this video, you will learn that 80-year-old grandfather Graeter still comes in to work every day.  For me the highlight was that one of the Graeter family members is named Chip.  Literally.  That is just too good to be true.

The second flavor I picked up was the limited-edition Summer Peach, available in Summer  The other limited edition flavors are Strawberry Chocolate Chip, available in Spring, Pumpkin, available in Fall, and Peppermint Stick, available in Holiday Season.  I like the idea of having a few, rotating limited-edition flavors so customers kind of know when to expect flavors to be available but still have something to look forward to each season.

The texture of the Summer Peach flavor was the same ice cream/mousse texture as the Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip.  So I really, really like fresh fruit ice cream, but only if it's done well.  All too often the strawberries in strawberry ice cream are frozen solid and are crystallized and crunchy without much flavor.  Not so with these peaches!  Just like the chocolate chips, the peach chunks in this ice cream were huge and chewy (not as chewy as dried fruit) and juicy.  Who thought ice cream fruit could be juicy!?  I drool.  This is what all fruit ice cream should aspire to.

One thing I did not like about Graeter's was the packaging.  When I got home from the grocery store, I noticed some ice cream on the outside of one of the containers.

There is no plastic ring around the outside of the pint or a plastic cover underneath the lid.  Just lid and then ice cream.  This won't stop me from buying Graeter's in the future, it just kind of squicks me out that I wouldn't know if the pint was tampered with

All in all, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.