Hate to burst your bubble–I love Haagen Dazs Five too–but it’s literally the same product as non-“five” HD ice cream. HD Five is marketing at its best. Good news is that all HD ice cream is that yummy and pure!

i loved the ginger ice cream… i haven’t been able to find HD5 in vancouver, canada where i live though, sadly. i tried it in portland… it was spicy and creamy and yes, a nice strong true ginger flavour!!

the passion fruit is awesome!

I agree with you about the Haagen Dazs Five. It is so hard to find ice cream or pretty much anything without there being a long list of ingredients that you can’t pronounce. They don’t make ice cream like they used too!

Where did the Haagen-Dazs five recipe go? Link seems to be broken…

Ragaius: Actually the link in the original post above was to the product page on Häagen-Dazs’s web site — there was no actual recipe. But it appears as though they’ve discontinued the “Five” line, so I’ve removed the broken link. Thanks for letting me know about it.

Russell

Just circling back… thanks for the info! It prompted me to pull out a carton of HD and check the ingredients for chocolate and vanilla – very simple, which is what I am looking for. I’ve tried your base recipe for vanilla and “Jerry’s chocolate” and I think I’m getting closer to what I’m looking for.

Thanks again!

How do you think HD maintains the texture without the stabilizers? Is it egg yolk magic?

Tina, my assumption is that the industrial-strength machines HD uses are colder and maintain a constant temperature throughout the churning, unlike machines we typically use at home (like my cuisinart ice-20). So maybe they can get away without using stabilizers.

Which, now that you mention it, means I’m unlikely to get something that tastes exactly like haagen daz with my current equipment. I’ll keep trying though :-)

But I’m just hypothesizing – maybe Russell has some insight.

So, yeah, Haagen Dazs benefits from some technology like high-pressure homogenizers and very cold flash-freezers. But they also do some extraordinarily scientific things that allow them to avoid putting things on the label that scare people.

I write about this a bit in my ice cream blog, in the post on emulsifiers: http://underbelly-nyc.blogspot.com/2016/06/ice-cream-emulsifiers.html

What they’re doing is modifying the milk proteins so that they’ll behave like traditional stabilizers. This can be done with precise application of heat, or with enzymes, or with chemical treatments—we don’t know precisely, because HD isn’t talking.

There’s nothing wrong with their approach, from a results perspective. But it strikes me as a bit cynical to use so much technology in the service of appearing technology-free.

And it rubs me a bit the wrong way, because there’s nothing wrong with locust bean gum, either. It makes no sense that we’re ok with thickening ice cream with eggs, but not the seeds of a tree that they’ve been using since the 1st Century in Egypt. Especially when the seed gum does such a superior job.

In our quest for “all natural,” we’ve become a bunch of luddites. We demonize things as “chemicals,” even though everything is a chemical, and we often single out ingredients that are no different from the ones we’ve been using for hundreds of years. All because we don’t recognize them, and we’re paranoid.

Don’t get me wrong—I like Haagen Dazs. Their flavors are only ok, but they get an enviable texture, and it’s impressive that they’re able to do so using such a minimalist, high-tech process.