If it’s labeled ‘ice cream’ it has minimum butterfat requirements. Doesn’t mean actual cream was used, but it has more butterfat than ice milk.
I’ll eat low-cost ice cream, but there’s nothing on earth like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Caramel Sutra. So freaking tasty.
It’s “sometimes” unfortunate that we live three blocks from a Culver’s …their frozen custard is marvelous.
didn’t blue bell get caught in some e-coil scandal a while back?
The one I’ve always wanted to try is magnum just to see if it’s worth 4.00 to 6.00 for an ice cream bar … they have a chocolate-coated cherry one…
I tried Ben and Jerry’s years ago and I thought it was pretty good but not with the fortune places wanted for it … now there just another brand they’ve gone down a bit …
This thread’s given me an idea. If I bought really good ice cream, or better yet, custard*, I could be happy eating less of it. A small bowl of The Good Stuff could be just as satisfying as the OP’s 48oz tub.
Watch for me on Oprah with my new… Ice Cream Diet!
It’s like my bandmate who, while the rest of the band was doing Jager-Bombs, would drink nothing but single malt scotch, because then he “couldn’t afford to get drunk”.
*ETA: a shout out to Culver’s. We’ve been SO good during the lockdown, but Culver’s being open has been tempting…
Does any company produce “ice milk” anymore? I haven’t seen it since the late 70s. Perhaps when Haagen Das (perhaps the first mass-marketed premium ice cream in the U. S.?) came out the contrast was too stark.
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I still see it in "store " brands and in the “healthy” freezer section occasionally I’ve seen soy versions of it
I guess I gotta go back and try Blue Bell again. I never thought of it as anything other than run of the mill brand like all the others.
+1. This for me, too.
Here’s the thing - good desserts and shitty desserts have the same amount of calories more or less. If you’re going to invest the calorie cost of the food, then eat a great version of that.
For example, I think sugar cookies are some weird ass thing that shouldn’t exist. It’s like someone purposely tried to construct the most amount of calories into the least amount of taste and enjoyment into a food. Why would you spend 1000 calories eating a bunch of sugar cookies when you could spend that same 1000 calories eating some really good cookies?
Same deal with ice cream. Get the good stuff, cherish the experience, make the calories worth it. The “what’s the most I cheap crap I can get for this money” is a bad philosophy to apply to treats.
I am a cheap-ass. No way around it.
I can’t eat very much icecream because of the carbs and sugar.
My favorite thing in the world(besides corndogs from Sonic) is cheap store brand icecream sandwiches. The cheaper the better.
DIL found me some Bluebunny, low sugar, low carb. Bunny Trax, It was just ‘okay’ for the price. I wouldn’t buy it again.
I tend to buy coolhaus. As others have said, texture and flavor is better. I do agree that it’s diminishing returns, and that I probably don’t get 3x the enjoyment out of it, but what does that matter? If I’m eating ice cream I’m treating myself, I want it to feel like it.
Your culprit may be carrageenan. It’s a thickening agent made from seaweed, and it causes digestive issues in some people. I used to think that I had a weird lactose intolerance that only happened with ice cream, but a friend with Crohn’s made an offhand comment about it being one of the things she was told to avoid, and a lightbulb went off. I performed a series of scientific* experiments on myself (*I ate Ben & Jerry’s, cottage cheese, and drank hot chocolate, all of which contained carrageenan, and had instant “results”) to determine if that was the cause. I avoid it entirely these days, and the issue is gone.
Just the other day I got some cottage cheese with my online grocery order, and forgot to check the ingredients until I was putting the groceries away. Maddeningly, it had carrageenan and it went straight into the trash. 
For the OP: life is way too short to eat mediocre food.
I’m no gourmet but I definitely want ice cream some grade above the cheapest. For a while, buying two packs of Bud’s Mocha Almond Fudge ice cream was on the list whenever I made the 2½-hour round trip to the Big City. Nowadays Wall’s Choco Nutty Crunch is sometimes available at the local 7-Elevens and I make do with that.
I’m afraid I’m humiliating myself by suggesting that Bud’s or Wall’s is a premium grade, but they’re definitely better than the default cheap stuff.
A related topic is chocolate candy. I don’t mind indulging myself on some of the chocolate bars available in grocery stores, but, boy!, a box of See’s chocolates was a real treat! And on rare occasions I’ve indulged at shops that sell chocolate for about $5 a piece. Wow! So delicious!! However do they make those chocolate candies so splendidly special??
I’m happy with non-premium, but after tasting Graeter’s ice cream on a trip to Ohio, I could definitely tell the difference. I’d say it’s worth paying for, though I doubt I’d actually do so on a regular basis if it were available to me at home.
Haagen Daaz and Ben & Jerry’s go on sale frequently enough that they are usually between $2.50-$3.50 per pint.
The Magnum ice cream bars I’ve found in Safeway aren’t that expensive; about four or five bucks for a box of three or four bars. So roughly a dollar or so each bar.
It was Listeria. They cleaned up their act and have been operating ever since.
I’m not saying that Graeter’s and the others aren’t better than Blue Bell, but that Blue Bell is 80% of the way to the “ideal” ice cream, and that you pay progressively more for smaller increases in quality toward that ideal.
I’ve not seen “ice milk” in some time, but last week I was tricked into buying a tub of “frozen dairy dessert”. The brand was Bryers and I’d assumed it was ice cream, but no, read the fine print from now on.
It wasn’t as bad as some low end ice cream I’ve had, such as Turkey Hill. That’s nasty stuff. Way too much over run.
My high school /early college jobs were at Baskin-Robbins. So I got accustomed to really good ice cream. Most stuff from the store just can’t compare. Although Blue Bell and Haagen Daaz are better than most. I really haven’t tried anything else that might be considered a cut above. Bryers used to be good but the last few times I tried it, it tasted like crap. Seriously, no better than Turkey Hill.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the really cheap ice cream doesn’t actually melt. Instead, it just sort of turns into a thick gummy mass. So gross.