THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CHOCOLATE ICE CREAMS
CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM
In preparation for National Chocolate Ice Cream Day tomorrow, we are celebrating with a curated-for-beauty selection. Doing research for this story was sheer bliss.
We’ve covered beautiful ice creams before, but this time, it’s all about the chocolate varieties… While vanilla is considered the most popular flavor of ice cream, chocolate is a close second.
The earliest frozen chocolate treat recipe was published in 1693, in Naples, Italy, in 1693 in Neapolitan chef Antonio Latini's cookbook, “The Modern Steward.” In fact, chocolate was an ice cream flavor even before vanilla ice cream became a thing.
Latini’s recipes were dairy free -- frozen versions of hot chocolate, containing only chocolate, sugar and water. Later, in 1775, Italian doctor Filippo Baldini recommended chocolate ice cream as a remedy for various medical conditions, including gout and scurvy, in his treatise, De sorbetti.
Chocolate ice cream became popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century, when insulated houses were invented to keep it frozen and readily available.
Basic chocolate is divine enough if it’s made with beautiful ingredients -- fresh organic heavy cream, top quality chocolate, real orchid vanilla, and cane sugar. Of course the ratios and the methodologies can tip the scale further. Check out the beauties we found for you:
Real Housewives is just one of the many amazing chocolate ice cream flavors at Coolhaus Awesome Ice Cream. Made with top notch chocolate ice cream with a marshmallow swirl and buttered rum, Real Housewives is more like a fantasy come true.
Coolhaus co-founders Natasha Case and Freya Estreller started baking cookies, making ice cream, and combining them into “cool houses,” their own versions of ice cream sandwiches. The launched them in postal van, outfitted as a food truck, at the Coachella Valley Music Festival in April 2009. Now, you can find Coolhaus all over the country in wisely stocked supermarkets, their two eponymous Southern California shops, and in food trucks and carts roaming the streets of Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas.
Also check out Chocolate Chipotle: creamy chocolate ice cream enhanced with ancho chilis and cayenne, Raaka The Boat: chocolate mint ice cream with Raaka mint chips cacao nibs and Oreo cookie crumbs, Chocolate Peppermint: creamy chocolate ice cream infused with fresh peppermint, Guinness Chip: dark stout ice cream with semi-sweet chips and coffee notes, to name just a few Coolhaus Awesome Ice Cream chocolate flavors.
Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream began as a classic American ice cream food truck, in New York City. It developed into a mini ice cream empire, with shops and trucks in NYC and LA.
Van Leeuwen Classic and Vegan ice creams are made with just a handful of fresh ingredients. Each flavor is a celebration of some of the world's best artisan producers and farmers both local and from around the world.
They make all the ice cream from scratch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The dairy ice creams are crafted with fresh milk and cream, cane sugar, and egg yolks. The vegan options are made with housemade cashew milk, organic coconut milk, organic extra virgin coconut oil, and organic cane sugar. Both are decadent. Classic Chocolate, Chocolate Cake, Dark Matter, and all of their other chocolate ice creams, use the finest chocolate, cacao, and cacao nibs.
Check out "The Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream Cookbook,", with over 100 vegan and classic recipes that you can make at home, if you are so inspired.
Debi Taub, of Simply Beautiful Eating, created Double Chocolate Ice Cream Pops, made of white chocolate chips, crushed pistachios, sliced almonds and “oodles of melted chocolate.” Embellished with rose petals, they are… simply beautiful eating. Check out her site, there’s plenty more beautiful chocolate (and other) treats to explore.
Salt & Straw, an artisanal ice cream shop in Portland, Oregon, focuses on locally sourced ingredients. It diverges slightly sometimes, as co-founders and cousins Kim and Tyler Malek like to pair chocolate with things like port wine. We like it too! Salted caramel chocolate ice cream gets dressed with port chocolate sauce and… it’s epic.
Another Salt & Straw indulgence is their Chocolate Gooey Brownie Ice Cream, made with their own house-baked brownies, marshmallow fluff, and Portland’s Holy Kakow Chocolates, so they’re extra gooey.
Salt & Straw partners with another Portland chocolate artisan, Woodblock Chocolate, a bean-to-bar maker that house-roasts cocoa beans in a 19th century-old fire roaster, for a flavor called Freckled Woodblock. They add Jacobsen sea salt, harvested from the Oregon coast, then use an old-school ice cream making technique called “freckling” to suspend the chocolate in an untempered state.
Why not celebrate white chocolate too on National Chocolate Ice Cream Day? No better way to do it than with Salt & Straw’s Roasted Strawberry & Toasted White Chocolate Ice Cream.
Fresh Oxnard strawberries are roasted to release their sweetness and intense berry richness. Mellow white chocolate gets toasted to caramelize… low and slow. It’s a heavenly spin on the celestial marriage of chocolate and strawberries.
Chocolate ice cream tacos! Yup! It’s a thing! A delicious thing. Developed by Wiz Bang Bar, a soft serve dessert bar by Salt & Straw. Crispy waffles form the taco shells to hold the soft chocolate ice cream filling, topped with chocolate sauce and sprinkled with sea salt. It’s a sweet spin!
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