This Oregon-based company has a different look! Alden's Organic and All Natural Strawberry was packaged with an old-fashioned kind of look and feel. The flat cream background held a sketch of a boy in pen and ink. Is this Alden? You could not help but notice this ice cream packaging among the others in the freezer case. After reading that the flavor was organic and all natural, picking strawberry to try became a must. There is nothing like fresh, all natural strawberry ice cream! This to me was very exciting and I couldn't wait to show Fred.
The USDA Organic stamp is not an easy seal to get for your brand. Alden's proudly bears this badge. You would think that this would drive the price of the ice cream up, but in fact, the pricing was competitive with other brands like Breyers and Edy's. (OK, so it was about .25 more...big deal!) This is the first time I have seen organic be accessible to those used to paying non-organic prices.
Upon opening the (unsealed) lid, it looked like the ice cream had thawed and refroze, slanting to one side. It did not look like it ruined the integrity of the taste or texture, but the shrinkage was considerable. The top layer looked...really pink. When I make strawberry ice cream, it's usually white with strawberry pieces. What's making the vanilla ice cream pink? It certainly can't be an artificial color. It took a glance at the ingredients label to see that Alden's uses beet juice for coloring. Very clever! The top was also speckled, like the strawberry seeds had been extracted and smattered throughout. I'm diggin' it. The aroma of the ice cream hit us as we opened the lid. I could smell strawberry and... something else I couldn't identify. Was it the beet juice? Whatever it was, it wasn't true strawberry, but it sure smelled good. I could literally smell it from about 18" away.
I have to say, since seeing that the beet juice colored the ice cream, I had to go ahead and read the other ingredients to see if Alden's had more tricks up their sleeve. I was interested to find that that the third ingredient was evaporated cane juice which serves as a healthy alternative to cane sugar. Also on the list was tapioca, which I am guessing was used as a thickener.
The cane juice serving as sweetener worked. The tapioca...I don't know. This ice cream was not really dense. It was more like a thick frozen mousse or Cool Whip. It was still very intact and very edible and passable as ice cream, it just had a different consistency than I ever had in an ice cream. The texture was smooth, and even though it seemed like more of a texture of an airy or "churned" ice cream; the texture of each bite was much better. Still, I prefer a denser ice cream.
The flavor of the strawberry ice cream was mildly sweet and nicely berry. It wasn't overkill like some other all natural strawberry ice creams I love. It was middle of the road, which meant I could eat a ton of this ice cream. Best of all, there was a great aftertaste of strawberry to help you savor the flavor longer.
- Kris