Posted by Stephen Rushmore
, May 19, 2008 22:02
Nothing can better capture the spirit of a small New England town than visiting its seasonal ice creamery on a warm summer evening.
RoadfoodDigest.com New England residents Chris, Amy and I have frequented many ice cream stands and read many articles claiming to find the best, but were never content with reading about other people’s experiences – we had to find out for ourselves! Our goal is to taste our way throughout New England on a comprehensive journey to find the very best ice cream and hot fudge sauce. To make things even more exciting, we are doing this over two weekends so all the tasting notes and experiences remain fresh in our taste buds. To our knowledge, nobody has ever visited and rated 50 New England ice creameries, and certainly not in such a short period of time.
Over the next several weeks, we will be posting detailed results of our findings, the sugar highs, crashing lows, and tales of our journey. We are having an incredibly fun time logging thousands of miles over two weekends to find, in our opinion, the very, very best of New England’s creameries.
The Short List
There are literally thousands of ice cream shops in New England, so we had to narrow our short-list using certain criteria that will assist us to focus on the very best. Therefore, we only went to ice creameries that processed their own ice cream and were not a national chain (sorry Ben & Jerry’s!) Additionally, we only included hand-scooped hard ice cream, which means gelato, soft-serve, custards and other varieties were omitted. We then made the final selection based on recommendations, personal experiences, and mining through hundreds of blogs and articles.
The Ordering
Vanilla ice cream is our country’s most ordered flavor, so we decided to sample one scoop of vanilla topped with hot fudge sauce at every place we visited. We also sample tasted several flavors at each stop before deciding on at least two more scoops of a specialty item. These varied from town to town, and ranged from Moose Tracks to Lobster (more on that one later!)
The Rating
The ice cream, fudge, and overall experience was rated on a scale from 1-5. The following is how we defined each value:
- One - The lowest rating and is an ice cream shop we don’t recommend if you’re yearning for a true New England ice cream experience.
- Two - Ice cream and fudge worth eating if you happen to be in the area. Since we are rating the very best, a score of “two” is actually quite good and would qualify for a listing on Roadfood.com.
- Three - Ice cream and fudge worth traveling across several towns to eat. A very memorable experience despite a few minor flaws.
- Four - Ice cream and fudge worth traveling across state lines to experience. Everything is fully satisfying and the entire experience is distinct and nearly flawless.
- Five - Epic ice cream and fudge. World class, highly memorable, and only reserved for the very, very best. The kind of ice cream we could lick a bowl clean even if we started on a full stomach. Only a select few of our 50 rated places might meet these criteria.
Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we share our delicious discoveries, and be sure to visit http://www.RoadfoodDigest.com/IceCream for our itinerary.
