nutritious junk

Its hot, not surprising considering it is summer in the northern hemisphere (I know I have some aussies reading this, so I guess you folks are bundling up with your hot chocolate or soup).  And nothing makes me forget the extreme heat and accentuate my love of summer than ice cream.  My love affair with ice cream (and actually, most frozen desserts) is rather surprising because I tend to shy away from most dairy products and always have since I was little (imagine, a nine year old the orders pizza no cheese, cheeseburger minus cheese, nachos minus “cheese” substance, etc).  But I really do like frozen novelties, and being that it only gets a couple degrees colder than our standard 72 degrees here in L.A., I enjoy it pretty much all year round. But when summer comes along, big ice cream companies come out with new products to wow us over. So today I took a stab at one of my favorite flavors that Breyers claims to have stripped all the “bad stuff” from (ie, sugar and some fat).  But have they stripped it of the owey-goey chocolaty-ness I love when I dig into a pint of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream? Well let’s first deal with the stats, a ½ cup serving (NOT my idea of a serving) is 90 calories, 1.5 g fat, 20g carbs, 4 g fiber, 4 g sugar, and 3 g protein. Actually, a bit impressive, given that it has fiber which is usually not found in ice cream, unless its fiber from the nuts or strawberries mixed inside.  The ingredient list is lengthy, but at least the bulk of it is recognizable ingredients like cocoa, skim milk, cream, vanilla, etc.  don’t think this is health food though, it does sweeten itself with a good dose of artificial sugar.  Breyers is very proud that this is a “slow churned” ice cream and hence supposed to be super creamy. So here’s the deal: creamy, YES! Very lovely in the creamy texture department. I recommend eating all frozen treats with a plastic spoon because metal can really change the taste and creamy-ness of your ice cream. Not creamy like gelato, but definitely like your average premium ice cream. But sadly, the cocoa taste was not very dominating unless I ate a piece of brownie or fudge.  Being a chocoholic, I would have liked the whole ice cream to have hints of chocolate, sadly only certain parts did. It didn’t taste artificially sweet, but it wasn’t as sweet as ordinary ice cream.  So overall, B ok flavor, not to bad nutrition, but could use more chocolate (hell, that’s a bad call because I think EVERYTHING could use more chocolate!). I’d like to add that I think I am being harsh because I have a personal connection with chocolate fudge brownie. When I was about seven and had a metabolism of a jackrabbit, I ate Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate fudge brownie for breakfast watching Saturday morning cartoons. And when my parents woke up, I hid the empty pint in a pillow on the sofa. I think those stains are still there.