mobanmarketCALIFORNIA — While supermarket shelves are filled with delectable pints from the likes of Ben & Jerry’s and McConnell’s, sometimes an ice cream craving can’t be satiated by even the most gourmet of hard-scoop varieties.
Soft serve, with its deliciously lickable, creamy texture, has a very essence that depends on it being swirled out of a specialized machine moments before landing in your hand — it’s just not something you can have at home.
Fosters Freeze scratches the itch perfectly, with its burgers and cones served without frills from a window. But there are wide swaths of the Golden State that don’t have any Fosters locations. So where’s a soft-serve lover to go — ice cream trucks, froufrou artisanal cone slingers and local gems notwithstanding?
Find out what's happening in Los Angeleswith free, real-time updates from Patch.
In search of an accessible cone, I decided to put some of the nation’s most ubiquitous restaurants to the test and rank the best fast food vanilla soft serve cones.
The contenders are all fast food chains where ice cream is not the main attraction — sorry, Dairy Queen. But in combing through these offerings, I found that some drive-thru cones are worth the trip themselves, while others fall short.
Find out what's happening in Los Angeleswith free, real-time updates from Patch.
4. McDonald’s picture-perfect, not-cold cone of fluff
If the Golden Arches’ cone has anything going for it, it has to be unparalleled convenience and attainability — that is if your local restaurant’s machine isn’t being cleaned or malfunctioning.
But McDonald’s vanilla cone is otherwise pretty disappointing. Its glossy finish glistened under the brutal fluorescent light of the restaurant lobby, looking more like a plastic film prop than something I wanted to dig into.
And when I did, I found the ice cream had a strangely fluffy texture akin to a slightly chilled marshmallow — how is this ice cream so un-cold while still maintaining a perfect shape? Its impressive structural integrity seems to be made for those holding the cone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other.
Like most McDonald’s items, the flavor is on point, though, with a pleasant vanilla taste and just-right sweetness.
My verdict: Skip it and get a McFlurry instead, which offers a more satisfying variety of textures.
3. Chick-fil-A — it’s not ice cream
Oh, how I wanted to like this one more. Chick-fil-A is known for its dedication to a higher-quality fast food experience, but its Icedream Cone doesn’t quite live up to the reputation of its chicken sandwiches.
Click Here: Manchester United soccer tracksuit
First, I was struck by its humorously excessive presentation: After ordering at the counter, a worker handed me a cone that was buttressed by an upside-down dome lid resting inside a beverage cup. It was an enormous waste of paper and plastic for a tiny frozen treat — by far the smallest among its competitors.
The cone’s noticeably golden tinge hinted at its greatest strength: a pronounced French vanilla flavor that tasted the most “real” compared to the other three ice creams.
But here’s the twist: The Chick-fil-A cone’s cutesy copyrighted name obscures a truth. It’s not ice cream, but “frozen dairy dessert,” a government-regulated category that also includes lower-end frozen stuff at the grocery store.
After learning this through Chick-fil-A’s website, my assessment started to make sense: that the creaminess of the ice cream — er, frozen dairy dessert — was overpowered by its sweetness. The USDA requires anything labeled ice cream to contain at least 10 percent milk fat, among other standards.
2. Burger King bests McDonald’s
In my back-to-back-to-back-to-back night of soft serve grading, I was pleasantly surprised by Burger King’s offering, which served as a palate cleanser to McDonald’s unsatisfying cone.
Immediately, I could see that BK’s ice cream had much more texture than its arch-nemesis. Indeed, this swirl earned high marks in what I consider to be the most important attribute of soft serve: iciness.
It was cold, with ice crystals that gave it a pleasantly chewy texture.
Though more sweet and with a less pronounced vanilla flavor than McDonald’s, I found myself wanting to eat more of Burger King’s cone — and more quickly — perhaps also due to the fact that it melted far faster than Mickey D’s warm-and-rigid abomination.
1. Tastee Freez exists, deliciously, outside of that song
I know what you’re thinking, how can the self-appointed purveyors of “The Original Soft Serve Ice Cream” fairly appear on this list?
Immortalized as a setting for John Mellencamp’s protagonists in “Jack & Diane, Tastee Freez is called out in at least 18 other songs. But the chain has seen more robust days since its 1950s heyday, when it had nearly 1,800 locations.
Today, only four standalone stores remain, as Tastee Freez’s most recent owners have saved the brand from being nothing more than a pop-culture footnote by offering a limited ice cream menu at some Wienerschnitzel and Hamburger Stand locations.
I’d argue Tastee Freez is still something of an obscurity, despite its cones appearing on the menu at — or in some cases, being co-branded with — dozens of fast food joints across California.
Despite its apparent fall from grace, Tastee Freez delivered with a cone piled high with creamy, custardy ribbons of golden-tinged ice cream. Like its competitors’, the cone was priced at around $3, making Tastee Freez the clear winner for value.
The ice cream was extremely rich, with a pronounced vanilla flavor complimented by an agreeable amount of sweetness. This is a drive-thru cone that feels like “going out for ice cream.”
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox.Fri, Aug 23, 2024 at 1:12 pm PT