Passionfruit Butter

Okay, so it’s backwards because it was taken from my Macbook’s camera, but hopefully it adequately captures the mystified gaze that this ice cream has permanently affixed on my face. Haagen-Dazs Five is so named because it contains literally only five ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and natural flavoring. (See my final paragraph for some commentary on this.) We got passionfruit and brown sugar, but there’s also milk chocolate, coffee, ginger, mint, and vanilla bean. There’s an addendum to the spiel that these ingredients (and these ingredients alone) actually contain less fat than your standard pint of ice cream.

The brown sugar ice cream tastes exactly, unabashedly like brown sugar – because of the germane ingredients list, there’s no room for additives to soften the flavor of straight-up brown sugar. But while I’ve found it a bit difficult to indulge my occasional molasses craving by swooping a finger through the bag of brown sugar or nabbing a pinch of the stuff while I bake, the just-so creaminess of this ice cream is the perfect medium. This leads me to another blessed effusion: the consistency of the ice cream is uniform and balanced, free of the flaky ice chips that often accurse other store-bought ice creams, indulgent without being unbearably heavy. It hits the palate in a delightful way: a gift, not a burden.

Passionfruit, too, is delicious, although the condensed flavor of pure passionfruit is a bit diluted by the creamy base; this is definitely primarily an ice cream, and the passionfruit is secondary to the aforementioned dreamycreaminess. The fundamentals of that slightly exotic intrigue and the fruit’s complex sweetness are retained, however, making for a novel (and kind of random) ice cream flavor – a welcome change to mint chocolate chip and berry sorbet.

True, I did just check Haagen-Dazs’ website for an ingredients list on other flavors, and many of the classics – vanilla, chocolate, coffee – contain just around five flavors. But from a strictly nutritional standpoint, skim milk comes before cream on the Five ingredients list (thus accounting for the lower fat). From a purely candid standpoint, I found I actually preferred the texture of the Five to Haagen-Dazs’ staples. And, finally, from a hungry foodie’s standpoint, I am wholly enamored of the brown sugar flavor, which can’t be found on the main ice cream line-up. So, yes, as cynical as it sounds, I’m sure part of this is vested in marketing gimmicks, but if I like what I taste, I don’t see what’s so wrong about that.