Central Dairy Tiger Tracks

Wowowow. Madeline has been BUSY with her ice cream eating. I have been slacking, I know, I know. But I DO have an explanation. Just over a week ago I moved to Eldon, Missouri, where I will be serving in AmeriCorps for the year. Eldon is not too far south of Jefferson City. For those of you that know your Missouri ice cream, you know that Jefferson City is home to the legendary of Central Dairy. Missouri State Track and Cross Country meets are also located in Jeff City, and every time I attend one (though I managed to attend several, but never race in a meet #datalternatelyfe) we got a trip to Central Dairy before driving home to Fenton. I have many a fond memory of Central Dairy, but I honestly don't think I have been since high school, which is frighteningly long ago.

One of the things I was most excited about in moving to Eldon was being close to Central Dairy. I was even guessing I would be able to buy it at my local grocery store. And I was! On my first trip to Gerbe's, just a few blocks from my apartment, I was greeted with rows upon rows of Central Dairy Ice Cream YAY! Now at Gerbe's they either don't sell Central Dairy Ice Cream in containers smaller than a quart or I didn't see any or I refused to see any. Either way, a quart of ice cream is quite a lot for one person, even me, to work through. This, of course, is the reason I haven't been blowing up this blog with posts. In fact I am STILL working on the quart. Why I haven't bought more ice cream I'm not quite sure, and next time I go to the store I will definitely be purchasing something else. But in the mean time you will have to deal with this post, and another post about actually going TO Central Dairy which will be posted soon.

H'okay, so, ice cream. Tiger Tracks is described as Golden Ice Cream Loaded with Chocolate Coated Cookies, Decadent Chocolate Truffles, and Stripes of Rich Fudge. Tiger Tracks is a very classic Central Dairy Ice Cream, the Tigers of course being the Mizzou Tigers (Jeff City is just south of Columbia where Mizzou is located) and the golden ice cream and fudge stripes being the black and gold stripes of the Mizzou tiger!

And golden ice cream is where I will start this post. What is golden ice cream?!?! Color-wise, darker than a traditional vanilla and, yes, you could call it golden. Flavor-wise, tasted like a mild vanilla. Ingredients-wise, seems like it just vanilla. I am thinking they are just calling it golden for the gold and black stripes of the tiger, but I still want to know if there is something I'm not tasting or seeing that makes golden ice cream something more special than vanilla. I emailed Central Dairy about a week ago (another reason I have been waiting to write this post) and I haven't heard anything back yet. I even was at Central Dairy (see my next post) and asked my scooper, but she had no idea. I sent the email again today, so hopefully I will get a response soon.

As I move on to talk about the rest of the components of this ice cream, despite the fact that I had to leave you guys hanging for so long with out a post, I am glad I waited to review this ice cream.
So look at the two pictures below:

What these pictures show is a hard ice cream with a vanilla-y base with an okay swirl, a sprinkling of small chunks and no big chunks. That's right. The first time I had this ice cream I got NONE of the chocolate truffles, only chocolate cookies. The swirl seemed kind of diluted and the chocolate cookies were good but really small. Overall I was pretty disappointed. But I put off writing the post, and you will be glad I did. So now look at these pictures:

These, are in fact, pictures of the same ice cream from the same container. But they were taken of ice cream from the bottom of the container! The swirls is so much thicker, as you can see in the bottom picture, and look a chocolate truffle in the top picture! To talk about this ice cream, you might think I was talking about a different flavor. The truffles were sooo decadent, rich and dark! They tasted and had a texture similar to flourless chocolate cake. The swirl had a similar taste, and was almost just like thicker, more pudding-y ice cream than a classic fudge swirl, but it was sooo good. These two very strong components paired with the less powerful chocolate cookies, which were small, light and nicely crunchy, made for a well balanced, well rounded deliciously chocolately ice cream. In addition, Central Dairy Ice Cream is very hard and has very little air, which makes it seem very delightful and old fashioned. I just wish they could have had it together a bit more to have more even distribution of all the components throughout the container. And I wish they would respond to my emails!

For any of you that follow my blog, I have an update on my last post. I got an email from the Cedar Crest people just one day after I emailed them, which was pretty awesome! I'll just copy and paste his email so you guys can see it, but it amounts to what I guessed. Their aging process is just like leaving the base of a homemade ice cream in the fridge overnight!

"First we will combine all the raw ingredients like the cream and sugars together in our pasteurization vat.  We then pasteurize all our base mix in batches no larger than five hundred gallons at a time.  This gives our ice cream that excellent old fashioned cooked flavor.  After the batch has completed that pasteurization process it is cooled down and sent to a holding tank.  This is where it is “aged”.  This allows the cream, sugar and any other ingredients to rest and help ensure that the full flavors are developed.  The next day we will add the final ingredients like the candies and cookies and complete the final packaging."

Bonus picture, look at the pretty ice cream bowl my aunt, uncle, and cousin got for me while in Vietnam this spring!