Ice cream highs and lows: A visit to the Jeni’s promised land + Sugar Hill taste test

The season hasn’t turned yet, but I was in the mood for a little early spring cleaning so I went Marie Kondo on my freezer, tossing out pints that don’t spark joy. When I started expanding my ice cream horizons and trying flavors from across the country, one thing I promised myself is to not mindlessly eat flavors I don’t really enjoy just because I spent a lot of money on them. It can be a challenge. I do manage to give away quite a few, but there are some flavors I can’t rehome, and there are some I just won’t inflict on others. In this case, all four pints I had ordered from Sugar Hill.

In their place, I wanted something that would bring some dairy-based joy. The weather was chilly, but not horrible so I decided to make the 30-minute walk to what I call the Jeni’s promised land. While I have a Whole Foods that’s only half that far, they have maybe two dozen Jeni’s at best. This one seems to have any flavor I want. I think I counted just shy of 40. I believe this is the most expensive grocery chain in town (Zupan’s, for the Portlanders here). It’s the kind of store where I’d never buy a full bag of groceries, but like to pop by once a season to see what’s new, admire $15 boxes of pasta and prowl the ice cream aisle for pricey temptations. But I was happy to see Jeni’s had dipped back to $9.99 (from $10.49 last year). Even more exciting … all of the flavors I haven’t tried. Do you see your favorite in there?

First up? The main reason I decided to make the pilgrimage: the new House Coffee flavor. That will be featured in my upcoming coffee series. After that, I spotted Cream Puff, which I thought was discontinued. It’s gotten mixed reviews, so I wanted to try for myself. Third? Jeni’s take on Cookies and Cream. I had planned to get only new flavors, but had to shift gears when I was shocked to find the holiday panettone flavor still haunting the shelves like the ghosts of “A Christmas Carol.” With only two left, I knew I had to get it, fearing I’d never see it again. Look for full reviews of the other three in the next week or two. In the meantime, I wanted to give one last shoutout to this holiday flavor.
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ICE CREAM HIGH

Cranberry Panettone with Chocolate Sprinkles: Of the five flavors in Jeni’s holiday pack, this is the one I wanted to see return. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the egg nog and pistachio. Peppermint White Chocolate and Dulce De Leche (which the store also still had) were decent, but this one brought the holiday magic. I thought I would need to wait till November to see if I’d get my wish, but the holidays came early — very early. Given that spring hasn’t sprung, the air is still chilly with winter and my holiday decorations remain stubbornly in place a little while longer, I decided to see if this pint could rekindle any warm Christmas thoughts. And it did— just as delicious as the first time. I like the texture of Jeni’s normal base, but her custards really do it for me, whether vanilla or lightly flavored like this one. While I’ve never liked panettone, this interpretation in dairy hits all of the right notes with brioche-scented custard, sweet-tart jam standing in for dried fruit and chocolate sprinkles for texture. 9.2/10
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ICE CREAM LOW

Sugar Hill: I originally planned a full post, then thought it might be mean. If you don’t have anything nice to say and all that. But given that I have seen mostly positive reviews, it’s worth urging that anyone who buys online should tread carefully with this one. If you’re paying premium prices, you expect premium pints from a craft creamery. I don’t know if this a mismatch of consumer and product (very high YMMV?) or something went wrong scientifically in production, storage or transport — I want to lean toward the latter because the texture is so weird to me I can’t imagine anyone finishing a bowl of this, much less raving about it.

Even before I opened these I knew something was off. They were feather light in my hand. To make sure I hadn’t suddenly transformed into the Rock, I tested it against an unopened Graeter’s, which felt like a 10-pound dumbbell in comparison. They advertise as high butterfat, so I was thinking they pump enough air into it to inflate a tire. But it’s not even whipped up in a somewhat pleasant way like Tillamook. It’s chalky and sandy and takes forever to soften. Even then it's not really creamy. 

The first one I tried was Red Velvet. I hypothesized that like other artisan creameries maybe they had fallen into the cream cheese paradox and the effort to make a flavorful base unleashed extra stabilizers into their formulas. It was very sour, but at least it had some cake pieces (that did not taste like red velvet). The blueberry cheesecake was worse (I’m using descriptions rather than the fanciful names; I think this was called Chairman of the Board). I was about to lay full blame on the cream cheese, but the other two didn’t have any and were just as bad in texture. The almond-rum-citrus flavor also tasted awful. It sounded appealing but the reality was a conflict of flavors, plus no promised jam. Only the peach cobbler tasted pleasant, with a nice mix-in and notes of brown sugar and cinnamon. If there were peaches I did not taste them. Either way, the texture was too awful to finish.

So … Has anyone else tried this brand either in their New York scoop shops or by shipping? Given how great the flavors sounded on paper and how much I paid, I have never been so disappointed in a food purchase.

EDIT: I took off my score on this one because it does seem from a commenter that scoop shops are very good. So it's very likely some kind of quality error in production, storage or transit. Anyway, I'd still be cautious if going online because you can only judge what you get.