Every David's Famous Gourmet Frozen Custard Flavor Ever!
Long post alert!
I ate an entire pint (minus a tiny bit) of ice cream seven nights in a row. This sounds like some sort of religious thing; the oil lasting for eight days; it rained for forty days and forty nights. I suppose if the particular ice cream I ate wasn't somewhat close to a religious experience I wouldn't have completed this arduous task.
So, why, exactly, did I do this? You can read here about how I was able to meet David, the founder of David's Famous Gourmet Frozen Custard and take home pints of all seven flavors currently offered by the company. I wanted to have a pretty quick turnaround on flavor reviews, so I made the incredibly difficult decision to eat a pint of ice cream a day until I was done with all of the flavors. Let me tell you, it was so hard </sarcasm>.
Before I talk about the flavors I will talk a bit about the texture because it was pretty consistent across all of the flavors. David's has a pretty high overrun (how much air is churned into the ice cream - the more air, the higher the overrun). This is to keep the price of a pint down, something I think we can all appreciate. Sometimes a high overrun leads to an ice cream that is too fluffy with not enough flavor. The opposite is true here. I think if there was lower overrun these ice cream flavors would border on overwhelming. The texture is very thick and chewy, as opposed to hard. It melts down into a foam or froth rather than a liquid.
Now for the flavors. I'll review them in the order I ate them. Each flavor I'll start with the description from the David's website and then give you my thoughts.
1. Dutch Chocolate
Dutch chocolate was our second flavor. It is rich and smooth and creamy and tastes like no other chocolate ice cream you've ever tried.
The thing that stood out to me here was how intense and dense the flavor was. Seems weird to talk about a flavor being dense, but this was. There was a lot of intensity in a little bite. Sometimes with chocolate ice cream it seems like the rule is 'the darker the chocolate the more intense the flavor,' o it was really nice to experience an intense milk-chocolate flavor. Another thing, there were no extraneous flavors here. Just pure, straight up crack. Uhhh, I mean chocolate.
2. Gourmet Vanilla
Gourmet Vanilla is an exercise in in quality and simplicity. We start with the highest quality ingredients - sweet cream, real sugar, Iowa egg yolks, and kosher salt - and flavor them with the finest Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla in the world. Simple. Pure. Delicious.
This is a flavor philosophy I can get behind. You should execute your basics in a simple and clean way that elevates them from a base flavor to something that's a superstar in its own right. This was one of the best pure vanilla flavors I have ever tried. It would have worked well as the base for a sundae, but also stood strong on its own. The flavor was rich and warm and intense. Sometimes vanilla ice creams are so bland that you forget that vanilla can be a complex and delightful flavor. Not so here. Also, there was no hint of the alcoholic flavor you usually detect when something is flavored with vanilla extract. This really fills your entire mouth with flavor.
3. Sea Salt Caramel
David spends hours in front of the copper kettle making his caramel from scratch for every batch. It's a secret recipe made from real ingredients. It's a bit of sweet and salty heaven in a pint!
Oh my god this is good. This has surpassed Talenti's Sea Salt Caramel gelato as my favorite salted caramel frozen dessert. Lately I've been feeling a bit salted-carameled out, but this pint proved to me that there is no such thing. First, the texture of this ice cream works amazingly with caramel. It's sticky and chewy just like caramel! Let me tell you, David's producing their own caramel is a winner. I love this flavor because, even though it's salted caramel, it is not overwhelmingly salty. Instead, it is very very savory with just a hint of salt. To me, this flavor straddled the line between caramel and butterscotch. Per the Smitten Kitchen, caramel is made with regular granulated sugar, and butterscotch is made with brown sugar. Perhaps there is some brown sugar in the secret recipe.
4. Gourmet Coffee
Gourmet Coffee is the flavor that got it all started. David and his best friend love coffee ice cream, but a local ice cream shop was always out of stock. David decided to make his own at home instead. Its popularity among family and friends got David thinking he ought to share it with you, too. Thus began David's Famous.
I have a love hate relationship with coffee ice cream. I've never had a bad coffee ice cream, but I've rarely had one that appeals exactly to my tastes. This is one such flavor. While eating this pint, there was a component to the flavor I couldn't quite put my finger on. I finally looked at the ingredient list, and I think the mystery flavor was vanilla. This really helped to flesh out the flavor and give it some more complexity. Also, this flavor was not too sweet. Of course, it's ice cream so it's sweet, but it was definitely more coffee than sugar. This flavor tasted really familiar to me, but it took me forever to figure out what it reminded me of. It reminded me of the coffee flavor from coffee oreos.
5. Gourmet Lemon
Gourmet Lemon started with a request from the frozen food buyer for a major upscale grocery chain. David thought it was an odd flavor request, but it resulted in something amazingly clean, sweet, and rich. If you have a weakness for lemon, you will fall in love with David's Famous Lemon Frozen Custard.
This tasted exactly like a lemon bar or lemon custard. Yum! It is sweet without compromising the tartness of the lemon taste. The sweetness and tartness coexist in perfect harmony. There was the perfect amount of flavor. Since lemon is such a strong flavor it can sometimes be overwhelming, but not here. The flavor also did not die out, but kept the same intensity from the first bite to the last.
6. Butter Mint
Mmmmmm ... Mint! And why wouldn't I make Mint Custard? Imagine the richest, creamiest after-dinner butter mint you've ever had. That's our Mint Custard.
Honestly, I was a bit worried about this flavor. I don't love butter mints. Not to worry, because I still loved this flavor. I think I liked it because it was heavier on the mint than the butter. There was mint flavor on the leading edge of each bite, and it finished with a mellow butter flavor. This was a really light and refreshing flavor. Check out Lizzy's review for a more in-depth analysis.
7. Rhubarb
Since there's nothing better than a piece of rhubarb pie with a big scoop of David's Famous Vanilla Custard on top, I thought the world needed a Rhubarb Custard. If you like rhubarb as much as I do, you'll love the heavenly sweet, sour, tangy flavor!
My first thought upon biting into this flavor was, "Ahhhhh, syrupy sweet!" Of course, there's more to this flavor than that. As I kept investigating (eating) I discovered that there was a lovely tartness on the back on the bite that served to keep this flavor from being overly sweet. Also, it was definitely a sugared-up rhubarb flavor, not a rhubarbed-up sugar flavor. This was another flavor, like the vanilla, that really filled your whole mouth. Each bite was a juicy burst of flavor.
I ate an entire pint (minus a tiny bit) of ice cream seven nights in a row. This sounds like some sort of religious thing; the oil lasting for eight days; it rained for forty days and forty nights. I suppose if the particular ice cream I ate wasn't somewhat close to a religious experience I wouldn't have completed this arduous task.
So, why, exactly, did I do this? You can read here about how I was able to meet David, the founder of David's Famous Gourmet Frozen Custard and take home pints of all seven flavors currently offered by the company. I wanted to have a pretty quick turnaround on flavor reviews, so I made the incredibly difficult decision to eat a pint of ice cream a day until I was done with all of the flavors. Let me tell you, it was so hard </sarcasm>.
Before I talk about the flavors I will talk a bit about the texture because it was pretty consistent across all of the flavors. David's has a pretty high overrun (how much air is churned into the ice cream - the more air, the higher the overrun). This is to keep the price of a pint down, something I think we can all appreciate. Sometimes a high overrun leads to an ice cream that is too fluffy with not enough flavor. The opposite is true here. I think if there was lower overrun these ice cream flavors would border on overwhelming. The texture is very thick and chewy, as opposed to hard. It melts down into a foam or froth rather than a liquid.
Now for the flavors. I'll review them in the order I ate them. Each flavor I'll start with the description from the David's website and then give you my thoughts.
1. Dutch Chocolate
Dutch chocolate was our second flavor. It is rich and smooth and creamy and tastes like no other chocolate ice cream you've ever tried.
The thing that stood out to me here was how intense and dense the flavor was. Seems weird to talk about a flavor being dense, but this was. There was a lot of intensity in a little bite. Sometimes with chocolate ice cream it seems like the rule is 'the darker the chocolate the more intense the flavor,' o it was really nice to experience an intense milk-chocolate flavor. Another thing, there were no extraneous flavors here. Just pure, straight up crack. Uhhh, I mean chocolate.
2. Gourmet Vanilla
Gourmet Vanilla is an exercise in in quality and simplicity. We start with the highest quality ingredients - sweet cream, real sugar, Iowa egg yolks, and kosher salt - and flavor them with the finest Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla in the world. Simple. Pure. Delicious.
This is a flavor philosophy I can get behind. You should execute your basics in a simple and clean way that elevates them from a base flavor to something that's a superstar in its own right. This was one of the best pure vanilla flavors I have ever tried. It would have worked well as the base for a sundae, but also stood strong on its own. The flavor was rich and warm and intense. Sometimes vanilla ice creams are so bland that you forget that vanilla can be a complex and delightful flavor. Not so here. Also, there was no hint of the alcoholic flavor you usually detect when something is flavored with vanilla extract. This really fills your entire mouth with flavor.
3. Sea Salt Caramel
David spends hours in front of the copper kettle making his caramel from scratch for every batch. It's a secret recipe made from real ingredients. It's a bit of sweet and salty heaven in a pint!
Oh my god this is good. This has surpassed Talenti's Sea Salt Caramel gelato as my favorite salted caramel frozen dessert. Lately I've been feeling a bit salted-carameled out, but this pint proved to me that there is no such thing. First, the texture of this ice cream works amazingly with caramel. It's sticky and chewy just like caramel! Let me tell you, David's producing their own caramel is a winner. I love this flavor because, even though it's salted caramel, it is not overwhelmingly salty. Instead, it is very very savory with just a hint of salt. To me, this flavor straddled the line between caramel and butterscotch. Per the Smitten Kitchen, caramel is made with regular granulated sugar, and butterscotch is made with brown sugar. Perhaps there is some brown sugar in the secret recipe.
4. Gourmet Coffee
Gourmet Coffee is the flavor that got it all started. David and his best friend love coffee ice cream, but a local ice cream shop was always out of stock. David decided to make his own at home instead. Its popularity among family and friends got David thinking he ought to share it with you, too. Thus began David's Famous.
I have a love hate relationship with coffee ice cream. I've never had a bad coffee ice cream, but I've rarely had one that appeals exactly to my tastes. This is one such flavor. While eating this pint, there was a component to the flavor I couldn't quite put my finger on. I finally looked at the ingredient list, and I think the mystery flavor was vanilla. This really helped to flesh out the flavor and give it some more complexity. Also, this flavor was not too sweet. Of course, it's ice cream so it's sweet, but it was definitely more coffee than sugar. This flavor tasted really familiar to me, but it took me forever to figure out what it reminded me of. It reminded me of the coffee flavor from coffee oreos.
5. Gourmet Lemon
Gourmet Lemon started with a request from the frozen food buyer for a major upscale grocery chain. David thought it was an odd flavor request, but it resulted in something amazingly clean, sweet, and rich. If you have a weakness for lemon, you will fall in love with David's Famous Lemon Frozen Custard.
This tasted exactly like a lemon bar or lemon custard. Yum! It is sweet without compromising the tartness of the lemon taste. The sweetness and tartness coexist in perfect harmony. There was the perfect amount of flavor. Since lemon is such a strong flavor it can sometimes be overwhelming, but not here. The flavor also did not die out, but kept the same intensity from the first bite to the last.
6. Butter Mint
Mmmmmm ... Mint! And why wouldn't I make Mint Custard? Imagine the richest, creamiest after-dinner butter mint you've ever had. That's our Mint Custard.
Honestly, I was a bit worried about this flavor. I don't love butter mints. Not to worry, because I still loved this flavor. I think I liked it because it was heavier on the mint than the butter. There was mint flavor on the leading edge of each bite, and it finished with a mellow butter flavor. This was a really light and refreshing flavor. Check out Lizzy's review for a more in-depth analysis.
7. Rhubarb
Since there's nothing better than a piece of rhubarb pie with a big scoop of David's Famous Vanilla Custard on top, I thought the world needed a Rhubarb Custard. If you like rhubarb as much as I do, you'll love the heavenly sweet, sour, tangy flavor!
My first thought upon biting into this flavor was, "Ahhhhh, syrupy sweet!" Of course, there's more to this flavor than that. As I kept investigating (eating) I discovered that there was a lovely tartness on the back on the bite that served to keep this flavor from being overly sweet. Also, it was definitely a sugared-up rhubarb flavor, not a rhubarbed-up sugar flavor. This was another flavor, like the vanilla, that really filled your whole mouth. Each bite was a juicy burst of flavor.
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| Bonus photo! I put some Rhubarb ice cream on an oreo because I hadn't had enough sugar the previous week. |
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