Graeter's Ice Cream

As many of you surely know, my brother in law and his family are major ice cream connoisseurs. They traveled far and wide to find the best ice cream made and they finally settled on a favorite, outsourced from Ohio, Graeter's.

Until recently, you could only obtain ice cream from this legendary ice cream purveyor if you lived in Ohio or via mail in an ice packed cooler delivered straight to your door.

While ice cream delivery does sound pretty awesome, it is really quite a treat and you can't have it when you want it, you have to wait. Now Kroger & Ralph's stores have started to carry the ice cream! Through a chain of family and friends, my sister learned this news and rushed to the store to buy every flavor they had. She then surprised her husband with an ice cream extravaganza. Later that weekend, I stopped by to give the ice cream my taste test.

Graeter's is known for it's special way of adding chocolate to it's ice cream. Instead of mixing in chips, they add melted chocolate to the end of the churning process giving the ice cream a bit of a chocolate layer that you hit with every deep scoop of the scooper. The method is similar to the Italian Stracciatella method except that it doesn't break down as much as the stracciatella does.

Because they are well known for their chocolate method their flavors all seem to have chocolate in them--even flavors you wouldn't expect working together with chocolate. But somehow they make it work. Graeter's delivers a creamy ice cream with the interesting chocolate crunchy layer and a huge variety in flavors (unless you don't like chocolate of any kind and then there is no variety), I particularly enjoyed the coffee chip and the black raspberry ice creams. I also really liked the packaging and had I seen it in the store without background probably would've purchased it on that alone.