• drail@fedia.io
    11·
    5 days ago

    There used to be a small icecream chain in SoCal called HugLife. Best icecream I’d ever had, vegan or otherwise. Incredible, creative flavors (matcha cookies & cream, earl grey, thai tea, etc.), creamy, incredible. Whenever I visited the OC to see friends and family, I would go at least 2 or 3 times, even getting noticed once hitting 2 locations in one day. I finally moved to the area, tried the icecream again, completely awful, but I figured it was a bad batch. Come back a couple weeks later, and they tell me it was this location’s last day, icecream is once again bad. Figure they were downscaling, so I went to their last remaining location in Long Beach, and it was still bad. They just put up their closure notice. My fiancée and I think that they started losing money after expanding so quickly (they went from 1 to 3 locations in like 5 years) and had to change their recipe to cut costs, but changing the recipe made the icecream suck, so they went into a spiral of cutting quality to compensate for low traffic, then traffic reduces because of poor quality. My heart aches over the fact that the best icecream I have ever tasted went down the drain the moment I lived within driving distance.

  • binarytobis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    I recently realized my go-to ice cream at my local joint (mint chocolate chip) has been vegan the whole time and was shocked.

    • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      13·
      5 days ago

      Vegan dairy alternatives have come very far in the past decade or so, a lot of them work as 1 to 1 replacements in specific applications, which is impressive, but they fail to capture the richness of cream.

      Maybe that too will change in time, here’s hoping, but for the moment, I stick with fruit, chocolate, or flour based desserts when preparing food for vegans.

      • huppakee@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        I agree, but I still feel buying a new vegan alternative is a cat in the bag though, sometimes it is better overall in taste/texture/appearance, sometimes it is reasonably comparable (except price obv) and sometimes the packaging looks great but the product isn’t attractive in any way. When it comes to ice cream i like coconut-milk products, but unfortunately that is one of the least animal friendly dairy alternatives, so I usually skip dairy alternatives all together and pick something fruit based alternatives most of the time.

        • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          5·
          5 days ago

          The coconut milk ones are probably the closest, but, as nit picky as it is, they don’t quite freeze right in a way that brushes me wrong. That said, I’m not a big ice cream fan, so when I have it, it better be good.

          When I’m asked to make a vegan dessert, I usually go for a peanut butter tofu chocolate pie, a shockingly good pudding pie style dessert with the bonus of protein content and some shock factor when you get to tell folks you’re serving them tofu for dessert, or a fresh fruit tart. I found that you can use oat milk, vanilla and Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer to make a pretty decent custard simulacrum, as long as you keep it sparing in the final dish. Works great for heavily flavored things like pumpkin pie and in fruit tarts where people are just gonna be tasting delicious in season fruit and some vaguely vanilla mush under it.

          Or, of course, baked goods, which have become largely trivial to veganize with modern egg and dairy replacements.

    • mortalic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 days ago

      Both Ben and Jerries (don’t buy them for political reasons) and cosmic bliss non dairy are delicious