Friday, June 24, 2011
Retail The Great Graeter's Invasion: Another Storied Ohio Ice Cream Comes Here
Posted by Dana Kopp Franklin on Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:09 PM
(It's funny how Nashville is in the midst of a fine Ohio ice cream invasion. Jeni's, the artisan brand with the haute cuisine flavors, opened its East Nashville shop today.)
Graeter's touts its "French pot method," preparing the ice cream in small 2-gallon batches. “Our secret recipe of fresh cream and egg custard is gently swirled along the chilled sides of a slowly spinning French pot freezer,” the company says. “A blade softly scrapes the sides of the pot, folding the ice cream into itself.”
The gentle folding keeps air out of the ice cream and makes it dense and rich, they say, claiming that a pint of Graeter’s weighs nearly a pound, almost twice as much as some other brands.
Unlike some other brands found on the supermarket shelves, Graeter's uses sugar, not corn syrup. Scanning the ingredients' lists, I noticed an absence of phony flavors. The strawberry, for example, has an intense berry flavor that comes from strawberries alone.
And some of Graeter's varieties are quite unique, like the black-raspberry-dark-chocolate-chunk. Graeter's can be found in Nashville-area Krogers and The Fresh Market in Brentwood. For a little more detail, check out what I wrote a couple weeks' ago in my Food Biz column in The City Paper and online at Nashville Post.
Comments (3)
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Picked up a pint (on sale) of the moca chocolate chip last night at Kroger, not bad at all. I think I like it better than some of the stuff local stuff that's around here. It actually tasted like coffee and the chocolate wasn't too shabby either.
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Whoops. Just corrected "blackberry" to "black raspberry." Thanks for reminding me, @gradym83. Guess I've got blackberries on the brain today.
Not only is Graeter's Black Raspberry Chocolate Chunk flavor delicious, it's also one of the most physically beautiful ice creams I've ever seen -- deep, deep plum color, punctuated with lustrous dark-brown chocolate chunks.
I have a lot of family near Cincinnati, so I've eaten Graeter's on and off my whole life. A few pints have shown up here in the Scene (photo shoot and whatnot), and co-workers seem to really enjoy the stuff, too. So I figure I'm not just having a nostalgia attack.
The Butter Pecan is especially good.
