I’m an ice cream fanatic. I’m completely and totally obsessed with ice cream. So, when I heard about Choctal Ice Creams, which specializes in chocolates and vanillas from specific regions of the world, I knew I had to try some.
The idea behind Choctal ice cream is that the chocolate or vanilla in the ice cream is “single origin.” This essentially means that the chocolate beans are coming from one place. Previously, it never occurred to me that ice cream manufacturers would get their chocolate from different places. But they do.
The single origin idea fascinates me because I can taste these different kinds of chocolate now, and then again when I travel to the countries they come from.
At Trader Joe’s I found a sample pack of Choctal. It contained four individually sized ice creams: Lush Rainforest: Costa Rican Chocolate, Creamy Smooth: Ghana Chocolate, Luxuriously Rich: Dominican Chocolate, and Intensely Dark: Kalimantan Chocolate. (Borneo is historically known as Kalimantan.) Of course, I opened them all at once so I could taste the ice creams side-by-side.
Honestly, I was expecting the ice creams to be all similarly flavored. Surprisingly they were quite different. My favorite was the Ghana Chocolate, followed by the Kalimantran Chocolate. They were a little darker, richer, and overall smoother. The Ghana tasted a little like coffee, while the Kalimatan tasted of caramel. The Costa Rican Chocolate tasted like typical chocolate ice cream (perhaps most chocolate in the U.S. comes from Costa Rica?). The Dominican was chalky.
The Choctal box claims “Choctal’s quest is to bring our consumers the most delicious, robust chocolate and vanilla flavor profiles the world has to offer — and we choose to do it in the most earth friendly way we possibly can. Please join us in celebrating and supporting small farmers and help save our planet by consuming products made with real vanilla and cocoa.”
I could be wrong, but the box didn’t appear to be recycled. And the ice creams congained gums (locust bean gum, guar gum carrageenan and lecitahin). Personally, I think it’s better for my health and better for the earth to eat ice cream made solely of cream milk sugar and sometimes eggs. (Which these days leaves me almost exclusively with Haagen Dazs and Turkey Hill.)
Eating this ice cream got me thinking more about knowing the orgins of all my food — not just the healthy foods I already buy local like produce, dairy, and meat. I think that even in my indulgences, like ice cream, I will do a better job of supporting small farmers.
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