I grew up in a house barren of treats – there was no regular supply of chocolate, snakes, sour lollies or caramels. There was one exception: ice-cream, and I was mostly free to eat it whenever I wanted. That constant, childhood joy was the start of a storied love affair. Later, when I had money to buy my lunch in high school, I would get a one-litre tub, a pair of spoons, and my friend and I would eat the entire thing and nothing else. Sometimes, if we were particularly greedy, we’d split a two-litre tub.
I thought tasting more than 20 varieties of supermarket chocolate ice-creams would be like a reunion tour of my favourite teenage-era bands, an hours-long journey of nostalgia, glee and excess. But my dream shattered in a supermarket ice-cream aisle when my dad, who was with me to help collect products for the taste test, asked: “Is this ice-cream?” The tub was in the ice-cream section, and the packaging showed pictures of chocolate ice-cream scoops. But nowhere did it say the words “ice-cream” or “gelato”.
Turns out this wasn’t going to be a tasting of 23 chocolate ice-creams, it would be a tasting of 14 chocolate ice-creams and nine almost ice-creams, mostly “frozen desserts”, products so frugal in their use of dairy, they’re legally barred from the honour of calling themselves ice-cream. Even of the official ice-creams, four of the products are so aerated they’re more like eating mildly flavoured mousse. (For this reason, price per litre only tells you so much about the value of a product. Check the weight on the nutrition panel – if an ice-cream is one litre but weighs 500g, what you’re paying for is a lot of air. If it weighs 900g, you’re paying for a lot of cream.) If this taste test is a reunion tour, it’s a cover band and half the band members are hungover.
Nine other ice-cream enthusiasts joined me for the taste test. We tasted the products blind, scoring for texture, taste and chocolatey-ness, but only texture and taste counted in the product’s final score (you can have a delicious ice-cream that’s not particularly chocolatey and vice versa). What we found was a solid mid-range of ice-creams with few weird and wonderful standouts, and nine frozen desserts that varied from just passable as ice-cream to sugar-flavour freezer ice. For that reason frozen desserts and the most aerated ice-creams have been excluded from the write-up below, but you can find their scores in the table below.
A note on dietary products:
There are no standouts. I think Elato, a coconut-based gelato with a mild and unusual sweetness, is the better option for vegan and lactose-free eaters. De Nada is a decent low-sugar option – it’s pretty chocolatey, but I can taste the artificial sweetener alongside an odd stale flavour. I can find no conceivable reason to buy a protein-added ice-cream – they are neither particularly healthy, high in protein or economical. I also question why they exist. Looking for health improvements in the ice-cream section is like inviting a health and safety officer to a duel – did we forget why we’re here? If you need the protein, sprinkle some nuts on top.
The best
Sara Lee Rich Ultra Chocolate, 1L, $12 ($1.20 per 100ml) available at Coles
Weight: 650g ($1.85 per 100g)
Score: 8/10
When a taste test finishes, there’s a brand reveal – it’s a time of great gossip, and on this day, everyone wanted to know the identity of sample 14. Not because it was a clear winner or, despite the name, particularly chocolatey, but because it’s so bloody delicious. It tastes like childhood Milo drinks made without parental supervision, with four scoops of Milo and a splash of milk. But instead of milk, it’s whipped with cream so it’s silky and mousse-like. My scorecard read simply: “I’m going to buy it.”
Häagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate, 457ml, $13.50 ($2.95 per 100ml), available at major supermarkets
Weight: 395g ($3.42 per 100g)
Score: 8/10
Sometimes you want something that’s extremely itself, like a 90s romcom or 60s rock song – it delivers exactly what you expect, what you want and nothing else. And in this case, that’s a creamy, chocolatey ice-cream with a generous spread of chocolate chips. You’d think a chocolate ice-cream taste test would be full of experiences like this, but it was not. This is the only ice-cream in the lineup without some combination of stabilisers, emulsifiers and flavours. None of those ingredients are bad in isolation, but if you use enough of them, ice-cream slowly becomes something else – you’ve remade Theseus’s ship with plastic. “Feels more real”, “tastes legitimate”, “a lot more complex”, wrote the tasters. That makes it dense and hard to scoop, but heat and time can help that. Nothing can help an ice-cream made with water, air and sugar.
The best value
Bulla Creamy Classics Choc Chip, 2L, $12 ($0.60 per 100mL), available at major supermarkets
Weight: 980g ($1.22 per 100g)
Score: 6.5/10
Almost every reviewer gave this between six and 7.5/10 – an uncontroversial middle-range experience; like carrots, no one will rave or rant about them. The consensus was it’s milky, malty, very sweet and full of oddly waxy chocolate chips. “Like a frozen choccy milk, but an average one,” one reviewer wrote. That’s not a bad compromise for $5.50 a litre, particularly when its price competitors failed to score above five out of 10, and received comments such as: “So boring, an ice-cream for bureaucrats” (Indulge Chocolate Gourmet ice-cream), “Why does it taste like the discontinued Nesquik berry flavours?” (Blue Ribbon Classic Chocolate) and “Tastes like obscure cheap choc, what you get in prepackaged kids’ lolly bags” (Monarc Silver Scoop Choc Chip).
Other notable ice-creams
Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, 458ml, $14.50 ($3.17 per 100ml), available at major supermarkets
Weight: 420g ($3.45 per 100g)
Score: 7.5/10
If you were a pre-internet kid, you might have had the wild idea to taste cocoa on its own. The experience likely ended in horror, but remember what you thought it was going to taste like? I thought it would be like all the chocolatey things I’d had before, condensed into a teaspoon. That’s what this tastes like, only in ice-cream form. It’s sweet, dense, intense and packed with hunks of salty brownie. Like a Pixar film, it’s designed for kids but I’ll enjoy it more than them.
Van Diemens Land Creamery Decadent Dark Choc Gelato, 500ml, $12.50 ($2.50 per 100ml), available at Coles
Weight: 333g ($3.75 per 100g)
Score: 7/10
Three reviewers wrote this same comment: “A very grown up ice-cream.” Unlike many other tubs, there are no gimmicks – no chocolate ripple, chocolate chips or fudge bits. There’s also a hint of bitterness from the cocoa (bitterness was also rare during the taste test); and the packaging is black, says where the milk and cocoa are sourced from, and describes itself, three times, as “decadent” – a word rarely ever said to or by children. I would expect an ice-cream – sorry, gelato – that makes such claims to have purity and intensity of flavour. Instead, this is rich, mild and carries a hard-to-discern aftertaste, almost a bit starchy. One reviewer wrote: “Primo gelato but not one I enjoy.”
Bravo Sicilian Chocolate Handmade Gelato, 750ml, $12.99 ($1.73 per 100ml), available at select grocers
Weight: 540g ($2.41 per 100g)
Score: 7/10
This tastes like the gelato served in long-running neighbourhood Italian restaurants – you know the type, served as a trio of flavours in a stainless steel cup, with sparkling white lemon sorbet and either a scoop of hazelnut or pistachio. It’s very sweet, bitter and intensely chocolatey. It’s weirdly low on dairy but is still quite dense, almost chewy, like eating gloopy ganache. If you host your birthday in restaurants with confident, loud waiters, white tablecloths and rocket-based side salads, this is going to deliver a lot of nostalgia and joy.
Messina Robert Brownie Jr, 475ml, $14.50 ($3.05 per 100ml), available at Woolworths)
Weight: 335g ($4.33 per 100g)
Score: 6.5/10
The tub says “Australia’s best gelato inside”, but only one reviewer thought it was the best in the taste test, let alone the country, and they wrote: “Sometimes the flavour that is obviously not the highest quality can still be the best.” This is enjoyable not because it’s excellent, but because it isn’t – like the Macarena. Most of the reviewers thought it was too sweet, relating it to McDonald’s thickshakes, cake batter mix and Cottee’s chocolate sauce. But it says a lot that only one person gave it a damning score. The brownie chunks were more divisive; depending on your interest in particularly cakey brownies, they will either elevate or ruin this experience. What will ruin the experience is the knowledge this is the most expensive ice-cream per gram in the supermarket.
Connoisseur Gourmet Ice Cream Belgian Chocolate, 1L, $12 ($1.20 per 100ml), available at major supermarkets
Weight: 720g ($1.67 per 100g)
Score: 5/10
This ice-cream has a twist. The initial flavour is relatively pleasant, if not at all chocolatey. The reviewers described it as malty, caramelly and very sweet – that’s fine, I’d eat it, so would any child. But then, like a TV script written during a writers’ strike, it turns into a waste of your time. “Like eating cheap cheesecake,” was the most generous description of the aftertaste. The harsher comments were that it’s “chemically”, “plasticky” and “like eating a couch covering”. My scorecard read: “A journey to hell.” If this is gourmet, then so is the melted Paddle Pop my freezer reconstituted into a plasticky ice blob.
Lick Couverture Dark Chocolate Real Ice Cream, 920ml, $14.99 ($1.63 per 100ml), available at select grocers
Weight: 916g ($1.64 per 100g)
Score: 3.5/10
So often in taste tests, the products that taste the most radically and distastefully different are bad health food substitutes, or products made with such inferior or cheaper ingredients they’re no longer recognisable as what they claim to be. But this ice-cream is different because it has too much of a premium product. The packaging claims this is 50% cream, which is just too fatty for most people. It’s almost greasy, like eating frozen butter. It wouldn’t matter how many grams of cocoa were in a stick of butter, you’d still just taste butterfat. Like public nudity, Ari Aster films and bright orange bedroom walls, there will be people who love it, but not many people will like it.
