Thrifty Ice Cream – Chasing Phantoms

You probably know of a house or two in your neighborhood that comes into its own on Halloween. It’s the kind of house that looks a little Addams-y, or at least is well-designed to accommodate cool Halloween decorations. I noticed such a house on Highway 49 in Placerville this morning.

*Sort of like House of Seven Gables, on a hill with a mournful ghost and a graveyard.*

*The ghost, I assume, is a temporary addition for Halloween. But what about those lions?*

What’s missing from the house is a pumpkin. Perhaps a jack o’lantern will appear on Halloween, but a little orange would complete the look, I think.

And that’s my awkward way of introducing today’s Treat of the Day. Recall our conversation last week about Thrifty Ice Cream. Well, today I had the opportunity to get a scoop of said dessert at Rite Aid.

I scanned their (limited) selection of flavors, and found this “limited edition” seasonal offering:

Would it be as good as the Thrifty ice cream of my childhood? Let’s find out!

Conceptual Soundness: Let’s color some ice cream pumpkin-orange and call it “pumpkin spice.” That’s pretty much the whole concept. It seems half-hearted and derivative. Couldn’t they come up with a better name that made it seem unique or playful? Like “Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About.” Or “Oh My Gourd!” They could also give it a bit more of a twist by adding something interesting, like candy pieces or rum or something. As a concept, this feels pretty flat. 1.5 points.

Appearance of the Treat: There’s a reason Thrifty ice cream is so inexpensive. They don’t put much effort or expense into appearance. The paper cup looks like it hasn’t been redesigned since 1985. Each scoop of ice cream is shaped like small can of chopped olives, with hole stabbed into the top c/o the clunky (but efficient) ice cream scoop that Thrifty has been using for decades The color is severely monochromatic and not even the right color. In a word, it’s boring. 1 point.

Taste: OK, this is absolutely delicious. It’s rich and creamy and sweet without being too sweet. I don’t really taste the much-touted “spice,” but that’s OK . This ice cream is so tasty, and the mouthfeel is so satisfying, that I am overlooking the misleading “pumpkin spice” promise. I had two full scoops and was left wanting more. You just can’t tire of this ice cream! 4 points.

Value: A cup was $2.50, which is half the price of B-R and other major ice creams. An easy 4 points.

Total Treat Score: 10.5 points/16 points.

Get a scoop and take it home to your haunted house!

BTW, the full quote referenced in the headline is: “The thrifty maxim of the wary Dutch/is to save all the Money they can touch.”

Baskin-Robbins is one of those names, like Nordstrom, that everyone seems to get wrong. (It’s not “Baskin and Robbins,” nor “Nordstrom’s”.) But however you pronounce it, B-R has been scooping up ice cream since 1954. It was the brainchild of two brothers-in-law: Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins. Since its inception the company has famously claimed “31 flavors,” based on the idea that ice cream should be an everyday treat–with one flavor for each day of the month. However, to date B-R has developed over 1400 flavors, and at any given store on any given day you might find more or fewer than 31 of those flavors on offer.

We’re talking Baskin-Robbins because today officially starts our week of seasonal treats from ice cream and donut shops. Fortuitously a new Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin [Donuts] shop just opened in the area, so I figured I’d drop in and welcome them to the neighborhood.

I was greeted by a smiling, friendly young woman with that kind of infectious enthusiasm commonly found in ice cream shops. But when I asked for “a Halloween-themed ice cream,” she looked like the android on Star Trek whose brain circuits fried when exposed to a paradox.

Is that a tricorder in your pocket…

She kept searching through her 31 flavors (which were actually more like 20) and finally, triumphantly announced she had pumpkin cheesecake ice cream. “That’s kind of like Halloween, right?” It’s not quite what I was hoping for, but I’ve got a blog to write and tens of thousands* of loyal readers waiting breathlessly for today’s post. (*Like B-R’s 31 flavors, the actual number of my loyal readers may not exactly match the official slogan.)

So lets’ get down to business:

Conceptual Soundness: B-R took the idea of a dessert (cheesecake, which, it need not be said, is neither a cheese nor a cake), then gave it a seasonal pumpkin flavor, then turned the whole thing into an ice cream. That seems like a pretty good concept for a seasonal treat, assuming they can pull it off. 3 points.

Appearance of the Treat: Well, it’s an ice cream cone. The color of the ice cream is reasonably pumpkin-y. But the scoop really doesn’t look like it appears in Baskin-Robbins’ ads, which feature “cinnamon swirls” and “delicious ginger snap cookie pieces.” Observe:

*From B-R’s official press release on August 29 of this year.*

The dissonance makes me wanna…

*The Deadheads among my readership will appreciate this.*

Let’s give the appearance 1.5 points.

Taste: Not bad. It has an exceptionally sweet flavor that could pass for pumpkin. It doesn’t have the chemically, off tastes that plague cheap ice cream and frozen yogurt. The consistency is very creamy, and there seem to be pockets of sweetened cream cheese. (I doubt it’s actual cream cheese, but somehow they got the consistency down pat.) So that’s pretty good so far as it goes.

I taste no evidence of the much-touted cinnamon swirl, which by all appearances seems to have been left out of this batch. What’s more, I don’t detect any of those ginger snaps. Some time ago I had a cheesecake-flavored ice cream that included chunks of graham cracker crust; now that’s how you make a cheesecake ice cream! This one, however, is just a creamy, pumpkin-y ice cream. I’ll give it 2 points.

Value: A one-scoop cone is five bucks. You can get a scoop of award-winning Thrifty ice cream for half that amount. (When I was a young tyke, Thrifty ice cream was 5 cents a scoop. Adjusted for inflation, that would be 49 cents today.) So clearly ice cream has far surpassed normal inflation. I’m mad about this and thus will award only 1 point for value.

*My dad would never buy me a triple scoop. “Do you think I’m made out of money?!”*

Total Treat Score: 7.5 points/16 points. I advise saving your money and instead buying the treat I’m reviewing tomorrow. You’ll thank me later.

Tag: Thrifty Ice Cream

The Maxim of the Wary Dutch

A Little Cheesy