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I’ve been really into lightness when it comes
to food of late. Not “light” as in less fattening (never
that), but light in terms of texture and density, how it feels between
the teeth, on the tongue. Barilla is lighter than Trader Joe’s
pasta. The dumplings at San Tung, my new favorite Chinese restaurant,
are the best I’ve ever had not only because they’re
fresh, but because they’re light, and things that are light
and tender just seem younger and fresher.
It’s telling that this penchant for lightness
should emerge during the last, fleeting days of summer. In a desperate
effort to squeeze the dregs of summer’s promise from a stingy
San Francisco (three months of fog, wind and chill followed by a
scant few weeks of blazing sun), I rallied a team of intrepid taste
testers and set out to find the best the city has to offer of that
most iconic summer treat: ice cream.
Ice cream is a complicated topic. Everyone has not
only a favorite flavor, but a favorite brand. Haagen-Dazs’
rum raisin might be better than Double Rainbow’s, but when
it comes to pistachio, it’s Ben & Jerry’s all the
way. How to compare the subtle smoothness of an “exotic”
avocado to the chunky, nostalgic appeal of rocky road? The only
answer is to keep it simple, and that means vanilla.
When I first announced the taste test, some tasters
were a bit testy about the choice of flavor. They thought vanilla
was boring, and what was the point of finding the best one, since
no one ever orders it anyway? They suggested coffee or chocolate
as equally ubiquitous and infinitely more popular benchmark flavors,
but I was adamant that it had to be vanilla. Coffee and chocolate
flavors vary so greatly – one company might use Peet’s
and Valrhona, while another uses Nescafe and Hershey’s. It
didn’t seem fair. Vanilla, on the other hand, seems a much
more standardized flavor. It all goes back to the bean. Of course,
as with chocolate and coffee, beans can be processed in many different
ways, but compared to the variety and unevenness of other flavors,
vanilla seemed a much more reliable and consistent choice.
Statistics later came to my aid, reporting that vanilla
accounts for 29% of all ice cream sales, totally eclipsing chocolate,
which comes in a distant second at a paltry 8%. All those pies a
la mode just wouldn’t be the same with anything but vanilla.
It’s a cipher for ice cream itself, the building block of
all other ice cream experiences. I wonder if we even taste vanilla
anymore. After all, it’s become a common synonym for “bland,”
“boring” and “middle-of-the-road.”
But our taste test quickly dispatched any doubts about
the tastiness of vanilla. We tested five different vanilla ice creams
– three made at local parlors and two nationwide brands available
at grocery stores. Even with such a small sample size, the differences
between vanillas were astonishing, ranging from the airy mildness
of Bombay Ice Creamery’s to the overpoweringly alcoholic Mitchell’s.
To eliminate preconceptions as to the quality and flavor of each
brand, we ran the test as a double-blind taste test. (This turned
out to be a very good thing, as once the ice creams’ identities
were revealed, some tasters were very vociferous in expressing their
pride at having preferred one brand over the others.)
An addled cousin of the Pepsi Challenge, the test
worked like this: the Scooper scooped the ice cream and assigned
and recorded a number for each brand. He then left the numbered
bowls to the Coder, who assigned a letter to each number and re-labeled
the bowls. Tasters then recorded their observations and scores according
to the letter assigned to each ice cream. Although far from perfect,
this system allowed everyone to participate in the test without
knowing exactly which brand was which.
To prevent melting and palette fatigue, the tasting
was done in two heats of two and three brands respectively. Tasters
then ranked each brand, and the three top brands advanced to the
final heat, where they were ranked again. With few exceptions, the
rankings were remarkably consistent. In the final heat, only one
vote separated the top two ice creams.
The winning ice cream was from Joe’s at Geary
and 18th. This vanilla provided the most desirable balance of vanilla
flavor, creamy texture and subtle richness. It went down smoothly
with no cloying aftertaste. Second (by only one vote) was Mitchell’s,
which was actually creamier than Joe’s, but smacked of too
much extract, leaving a bitter and unpleasant aftertaste. Third
place went to dense and creamy Haagen-Dazs, my grocery store vanilla
of choice. Actually a French vanilla (containing egg yolks), although
it’s not labeled as such, it may have had an unfair advantage,
since our taste test focused on garden variety vanillas. At any
rate, a subsequent showdown between the two national brands proved
no contest: Haagen-Dazs beat Ben & Jerry’s for texture
and flavor hands down.
Light, airy and pure white, my favorite ice cream
in the second heat was from Bombay Ice Creamery. However, I was
utterly alone in this assessment, and my favorite finished dead
last in the final tally. The other tasters disparaged it by comparing
it to whipped cream. I thought that was a good thing. Some even
ventured to assert that it was barely vanilla (or ice cream) at
all. I may have to concur. I had tasked them with finding the best
vanilla ice cream, and they took that task to heart, looking for
the ultimate in vanilla flavor: the stronger, the better. Perversely,
I liked the Bombay vanilla because it was chasing a different ideal
of what a vanilla could be. Here was an adventurous vanilla, a vanilla
that tested preconceived notions. It was wearing its blandness,
boringness and middle-of-the-road-ness on its sleeve and not caring
who noticed. Instead of going for bombastic flavor, competing with
the chocolates and the coffees of the world, it turned plain ol’
vanilla into a statement, something new, light and fresh.
In the end, it was the dense, creamy, flavorful vanillas
that won out over upstart lightness and airiness, and despite my
rhapsodizing, I’m not too upset about it. The one insight
I overlooked in my rush to glorify the “new vanilla”
is that vanilla is like comfort food – your favorite is always
what you already know. It’s antithetical to the concept of
vanilla to be adventurous or to buck the dominant trend. Vanilla
is vanilla precisely because it’s always exactly what you’d
expect. But I’ll never take it for granted again.
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