When I make ice cream, I don’t use any emulsifier or stabilizer. I tried using egg, and I tried plain ice cream, and I prefer plain. So “vanilla”, not “French vanilla”. I usually make fruit flavors or ginger. I use lots of butterfat, and it’s delicious.
My latest attempt had half and half, cream, raspberries, and sugar. I only partially crushed the raspberries, to give it some texture. It was fabulous.
The best premium brands are similar to what I make.
Yogurt and beer sure taste different from my first exposure to them. I think commercial yogurt used to be thinner and had more active cultures. As for beer, well, they don’t make Falstaff anymore.
Both Squirt and 7-Up taste differently than they did when I was a kid but there’s an explanation for it. Squirt used to have real grapefruit juice in it but they took it out to save costs and 7-Up has been reformulated at least once since the early 70s.
Breyers survived for multiple decades made the way it was with minimal ingredients just fine before the new owners decided to reformulate it. It’s not as if the stuff was a delicate flower, unable to survive the rigors of storage and freezing.
And it tastes and feels unsupportably different from the original product.
As a child my favourite food was Campbell’s soup “Chicken Noodle-o’s”. When I was in my 30’s I treated myself to a can and it was inedible. Way too salty.
Vachon snacks (Canadians know what I’m talking about) have changed dramatically for the worse. Jos. Louis, that used to taste like chocolate cake and sugary icing, now taste like nothing.
McDonald’s sundaes and milkshakes have also changed for the worse.
Last time I made ice cream was at a friend’s “lets all make interesting flavors of ice cream” party. (He supplied cream, half and half, and liquid nitrogen to freeze it.) Afterwards, I drove it across town (without refrigeration) and then popped it in my freezer. It was a week before I finished it, and it remained delicious, and kept a good texture.
Would it have kept for months? Probably not.
This. I bought Breyers for years, and it was excellent. It’s amazing what they can do with refrigerated trucks these days.
Traditional ice cream and “stabilized” ice cream are different, and I prefer traditional. But tastes vary. My husband’s uncle preferred stabilized. He said he liked every brand except Breyers. He had an ancient fridge that barely worked, and that may have contributed. But I think he liked the texture you get from carageenan.
Nabisco premium saltines: The only cracker I’d eat. First they made them thinner, so they’d break when you put some PB on them. Then they changed the process somehow and now they taste like a science project.
Red M&Ms don’t taste as bitter as they used to. Also, sweet potatoes aren’t quite as bad as when I was young. If you forced me to eat a bite of sweet potato when I was a kid, I would literally need to vomit since it would taste so bad! Now they’re merely distasteful. 'Tis said one’s sense of taste fades with time. Maybe it’s the reason for these changes.
That, and Haagen-Dazs still manages to make it work with their chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, green tea, and coffee ice creams. All are made with just five ingredients (cream, milk, sugar, egg yolks, and the flavoring).
When Stonyfield brand yogurt premiered, it was noticeably more tangy than other supermarket brands, and I loved how it tasted “like dairy used to” when I was in my teens. My older sister noticed this as well. Within months, Stonyfield reformulated so as to taste like every other name brand of yogurt. Still decent enough yogurt, in my opinion, but, clearly, they attempted to do something different and it didn’t go over with current tastebuds …
Stonyfield also used to let the yogurt grow in the container, and the yogurt had the distinctive texture that yogurt forms. Now they must make it in huge vats, because now it’s “creamy” and has been beaten with stabilizers. It isn’t anything like what out used to be. I’ve switched to a local brand.
I came in here to say exactly the same thing. Even at the peak season, from locally grown, picked-yesterday, farmer’s market type peaches, they have a weird…kinda…sawdusty? taste. Even if they’re juicy, they all seem to have an off/weird flavor. And they’re mostly not all that juicy.
Nectarines are better, but at least the ones I get won’t stay fresh. They’ll go from under-ripe to ripe in a couple of days, but will then turn to mush/rotten almost overnight.
When they eliminated the aluminum cans with the old-school ring pull-top, they killed one of the best tasting puddings of all time. Those little plastic containers are horrific, changed the flavor completely, and the foil on top isn’t even worth licking anymore. With the old cans, you’d risk slicing your tongue clean off because the lid tasted so good, it was worth the risk. Damn shame, and yes I’m bitter.
