Prairie Farms Cinnamon Churro

So far on the blog I haven't reviewed any non premium ice cream brands. I'm living at home this summer, and growing up, ice cream that came in paper boxes was standard. I have many memories of shivering in the freezer section of Shop 'N' Save looking wistfully at Edy's while my dad would pick out Prairie Farms Moose Tracks or Mint Chip again. So I guess in college, I rebelled. Nothing but Ben and Jerry's and Haagen Dazs for me. Now that I've graduated, maybe I've matured out of this rebellious phase and I'm once again content with letting my dad pick out Prairie Farms ice cream for me.

Prairie Farms is a Midwest dairy cooperative, so my coastal friends don't have the wonderful memories of buying a milk chug from the Prairie Farms vending machine after a sports practice, and of course, as the name implies, chugging it and then feeling quite a bit sick after. This was a frequent practice of my high school track team and I always bought the chocolate malt flavor.

The full line up of milk chug flavors!

Other than knowing how delicious their milk chugs are before today I didn't know much about the company, Prairie Farms. So I did a little reading. Started in 1938, all the farms in the cooperative are family owned, and none of the cows are treated with artificial grown hormones like, rbST and rBGH. In order to keep their milk antibiotic free, milk from cows being treated with antibiotics aren't used until the cow is off the antibiotics. 

Now for the ice cream. This "feature flavor" is described as Cinnamon ice cream blended with cinnamon sugar shortcake and crunchy cinnamon pieces. My expectations weren't high going into this. I'm not a huge cinnamon fan and Prairie Farms isn't known for high quality ice cream. But I would have to say this ice cream was at least a bit better than my expectations.

The cinnamon flavor of the ice cream was very strong, with an aftertaste of vanilla. I was very surprised that Prairie Farms went for such a bold cinnamon flavor in the base of the ice cream. The crunchy cinnamon pieces were also very strong and added nice texture, but there were really more of them than necessary. Since the base was so strongly flavored tons of extra bursts cinnamon weren't really needed. The short cake pieces were too small and too few as they were really the only variety of flavor in the ice cream. Another interesting thing is that this ice cream is pretty low cal. Only 160 per half cup! But don't worry, you couldn't taste that it was so light.

Would I get this ice cream again? Nahh, but at only $3.99 a half gallon from Schnucks', if you are a cinnamon fan on a budget, this is definitely the ice cream for you!!