Is this the world’s healthiest ice cream, or the sneakiest?
A new brand contains hidden vegetables. Lucy Denyer tries it out on two willing accomplices
It looks like ice-cream. It smells like ice cream. It tastes like ice-cream. Indeed, it is ice cream – but not, perhaps, as you know it. Yes there’s sugar, and cream. But also, confoundingly … carrots and beetroot and vitamins.
And yet the dense, rich offering in front of me tastes, frankly, delicious – vanilla ice cream that is definitely more Waitrose than Walls. Only, it also has parsnips in it. Modern wizardry. “It’s a treat – it’s meant to taste great”, says Toby Moore, one of the three founders of Smugglers, which launches its “hidden veg” ice cream in, yes, Waitrose this Sunday: vanilla with hidden parsnip, chocolate with sneaky beetroot and strawberry with stealth carrot (at £5 for a 460ml pot). “If kids aren’t going to eat it, Mums aren’t going to buy it.”
Setting aside Moore’s assumption that it’s mums that do the food shopping, kids will, in my experience, try anything that looks even vaguely like ice cream. Certainly my two boys, aged nine and six, are happy to dig in. “I can’t really taste the vegetables”, declares the nine-year old, taking an enormous lick of the chocolate option (which tastes luxuriously of cocoa, and not at all of beetroot). “It tastes like normal ice cream.” “I love it”, says my six-year-old. Several scoops in, “it’s very light and flavour-y” ruminates the nine-year-old, before asking for a second helping, just to make sure.
A hit, clearly – although whether it’s really true that this has solved the age-old problem for parents of getting their children to eat more veg is rather a moot point. I’m pretty sure Waitrose won’t, as its ice cream buyer Joe Sharkey jokes, really be wondering whether to stock Smugglers alongside the frozen peas or the dessert.
Smugglers are far from the first to incorporate unusual flavours into ice cream, although mostly, a wacky flavour is exhibited loud and proud as opposed to hidden away. In recent years avocado ice cream has been quite the thing, while top chefs are constantly experimenting with savoury flavours: witness Adam Wood at Cambridge restaurant Garden House adding roasted potato skins to ice cream, and San Francisco’s Flour + Water restaurant’s renowned parmigiano reggiano gelato.
Neither is this sort of tomfoolery a recent fad. “Historically, ice cream was really experimental: in ice cream’s 18th-century heyday there were all sorts of flavours – cucumber, ginger, artichoke, parmesan,” says the food historian Tasha Marks. “It was still meant to taste nice – it wasn’t hiding, but more celebrating, the vegetables.”
Which brings us back to whether Smugglers is onto something, or whether its attempt to fool the kids will backfire. Certainly, when you look at the like-for-like nutritional value, Smugglers’ chocolate-with-beetroot offering contains 48 per cent less fat, 39 per cent fewer calories and 31 per cent less sugar than an identically-sized pot of Haagen-dazs Belgian Chocolate. The Smugglers chocolate with beetroot is 186 calories per 100g, while Haagen-dazs is 306.
“Also, we’ve got a bunch of vitamins in there,” adds Moore – specifically vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12 and vitamin C. So yes, it’s a healthier thing to have in the freezer if you’re going to have ice cream in there at all. But double cream and sugar still make up the heftiest proportion of ingredients – the chocolate flavour’s hidden beetroot comprises just 8 per cent of what’s in there – which doesn’t really count as one of your five a day, unless perhaps you’re scoffing the whole tub.
As for hiding the veg in there… well, I confess, I’m not a massive fan of sneaky vegetables. I’m not averse to blitzing a bit more veg into a spag bol or a soup, but I’d rather teach my kids to love carrots or parsnips in and of themselves than conceal them in some ice cream. The veg-ice cream market is undoubtedly a tough one to get right: in 2014 Haagen Dazs launched “Spoon Vege” ice cream in Japan, in Tomato Cherry and Carrot Orange flavours, which contained extra veg and about half the normal amount of milk fat in each pint. It sank without a trace, and is no longer available.
But nearly a decade on, maybe our tastes have evolved – and my boys certainly found Smugglers quite to their liking. Frankly, if it assuages the guilt of having a permanent tub of ice cream in the freezer to dig into I’m all over it.