Taking a trip of nostalgia recently. Ice cream cones served up “old style”
As a kid, there was nothing better than an ice cream cone after dinner, especially when your parents took you out to a place that had ice cream treats. While I enjoy places that serve up “premium” ice creams and fancy fro-yo, sometimes I hearken back to “old school” ice cream. We have a Foster’s Freeze fairly close to our house, and not having grown up in the Bay Area, I would describe it as a local version of a Dairy Queen. They offer soft serve ice milk which can be made into shakes or dispensed into cones. They also offer a chocolate dipped version which coats the ice cream in a semi-hard chocolate shell. And it’s ice milk, so it’s not as bad as other soft serve ice cream, right?
Theresa has tried to get me to try ice cream by the scoop from Rite-Aid, which she has had since her childhood. I’m thinking, it’s probably just ice cream made on contract by a company like Dreyers that someone digs out of a large container in a store freezer case, What’s so special about that? She finally convinced me to try it tonight. While I was somewhat right about the ice cream itself, (tasted like something I could get out of a Dreyer’s or Breyer’s ice cream box), what stood out is the way the ice cream is put atop the cake cone. Rite-Aid has a proprietary ice cream scooper contraption that reminds me of a caulk gun or extruder except without the narrow applicator tip, similar to the tool that scientists use to take core samples of ice,. snow, or soil, but without the jagged teeth. The form that the ice cream takes upon extrusion is that of the cake cone, except inverted. What this means in practice is it eliminates the variability between different employees, effectively packs the ice cream so you don’t have any air pockets, and results in a single “scoop” that equates to 2 scoops at your local Baskin Robbins or Swensons (for those of you from the South). At under $2, you definitely get your money’s worth.
We opted for Cookies and Cream and Malted Chocolate Crunch. They have about 10 flavors in total when we went there, but they were out of Theresa’s favorite, Mocha Almond Fudge. Who knew Rite-Aid Ice Cream was so popular? Great value and they carry on the tradition of drug store ice cream. Reminds me of the old K&Bs in New Orleans.