There are two ice cream establishments in my neighborhood. At one, you can get an ice cream on a stick for just over a dollar. You eat it sitting in the parking lot with a warm spring breeze blowing through your hair. It has 210 calories, making it a reasonable-ish dessert. The teens who work there are nice enough, but since you order through glass, there isn’t much interaction.
At the other establishment, the smallest serving of ice cream is double the size of a Dilly Bar, and nearly three times the price. It has twice the calories, without the mix-ins that the chain is famous for. You eat it inside the always-crowded store, on tables that feel vaguely sticky. The young people working there are “high energy” and have been known to sing—my least favorite habit for a server.
Judging by the size of the crowds at each establishment, it would seem that my preference for Dairy Queen over Cold Stone Creamery is a minority opinion.
That’s why I was thrilled to read Justin Peters’s takedown of Cold Stone Creamery in Salon.
In “What Happened to Plain Old Vanilla?” Peters explores the history of mix-in ice cream chains, starting with the grand old man of mix-ins, Boston’s Steve Herrell (“the first person to grind up Heath Bars, Reese’s cups, Oreos, and other name-brand confections and mix them into ice cream”).
But Peters is definitely not a fan of adding cookies, candy, and cake to his ice cream, calling his visits to mix-in ice cream stores over the past years “increasingly penitential.”
Whereas a visit to Ben and Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs leaves me wanting more, a visit to Cold Stone leaves me wanting a salad and a shower.
Peters gets right to the heart of the matter. When mix-ins are your stock in trade, your ice cream has to play second fiddle. Or worse:
For starters, the ice cream itself has a vomit-inducing heft, gloppy and voluminous, like lard coated in Cool Whip. … For the mix-ins to be effective, the base in which they’re smooshed can’t be too distinctive, can’t hit any notes other than an anonymous and stultifying drone: Rich and empty, nauseatingly sweet and vaguely artificial, it’s the Paris Hilton of ice cream.
Paris Hilton is sweet?
You do a disservice to Paris Hilton. I would be way more interested in, shall we say, oral interaction with her than a with cone of Cold Stone. Their chocolate has only a hint of chocolate and the consistency is what I imagine eating paint would be like.
I don’t think the problem is the technique so much as the McDonalds-fication of what is essentially gourmet ice cream. We have Amy’s Ice Cream here in Austin, and they manage to do this right. They have very interesting flavors. Any time you go in there are going to be 2 or 3 flavors you haven’t heard of before. And every one of their flavors taste good without mixing anything in. I often have to really question whether I even want to mix anything into them.
My favorite is Guinness ice-cream with GrapeNuts cereal mixed in. Which is a flavor combination that I can’t imagine getting at a national chain store. They also have pretty small serving sizes. So, I take exception with the article only because I’ve seen it done right.
Guinness ice cream?? I’d like some of that….sounds more gourmet than cold stone
I guess the mix-in craze is the new version of the DQ blizzard but I gotta say, I prefer traditional ice cream. I do think cold stone ice cream is WAY too sweet, but then again…it fits right in with the whipped-cream-and-sprinkles starbucks crowd. No wonder americans are getting bigger.
Dairy Queen mixes stuff into their icecream too… the only difference is that theirs is softserve!
I’m proud to live in a Queens neighborhood, Forest Hills, where a Cold Stone Creamery quickly went out of business. When it first opened, I had no idea what it was and went in expecting to get a scoop of strawberry on a sugar cone. I quickly realized the only option was a bucket of glop with stuff and left.
Apparently, many in the neighborhood did the same. There’s a Baskin Robbins nearby, and though it’s not the best ice cream, at least parents can get their young children a small dish of ice cream or yogurt. Same for the old folks. Phooey on huge portions of crap!
I frankly adored Herrell’s when I lived in Boston, but I never went for his “smush-ins.” His premium single flavors were intense and delectable enough, his peppermint could very well have actually improved your breath, and his vanilla was awesome.
However, I am also prefer DQ to Cold Stone. Maybe it’s nostalgia because I grew up with it, but I love everything they have from Dilly Bars to dipped cones to Blizzards. Cold Stone was too, too much of too much.
Steve Herrel may have been the progenitor of “mix-ins” but what should be lost in that statement is that he also made great ice cream. Regardless of which way you like, make mine plain, that should be lost in the discussion. He spawned, literally, dozens of handmade, super-premium imitators. The ice cream world, if not my arteries, is a better place because of him. Cold Stone and Herrell’s barely belong in the same article.
I wish we had the ability to edit these comments;
“what shouldn’t be lost”
repeat…..”what shouldn’t be lost” :-))
Those slabs gross me out. What ever happened to simple toppings? I know the employees use paddles to mix the ingredients in but I’d prefer to have it straight, without any mix ins.Cold Stone is for kids who don’t know any better.