Written and Edited BY RIDA SHAKEEL AHMED
i munch on my butterscotch ice cream, occasionally chewing on the petite gummy titbits of caramel toffee that sometimes get stuck in your third molars. the spoonful of chilled treat melts into my mouth the moment it touches the warm insides of my cheeks. i can taste the buttery dairy flavour in the aftertaste. a brain fuzz attacks me as i bite into another chunk.
Butterscotch is the chewy, sweet goodness made with; brown sugar, water, molasses, and yummy cream that just melts on the warm insides of your cheeks with the first bite. Sometimes, it also gets stuck in your teeth. But what makes this hard grizzly candy the best treat is to have it in an ice cream and cookies.
Why butterscotch?
The sweet, buttery and rich caramel taste profile gives it the best option to have as a popular ice cream flavor, and also as a sweetener to some coffee. There’s so much you can do with this gooey candy; the possibilities are an endless pool. And it never goes out of style!
There are a ton of artificial flavorings out there that give an overpowering sweet burn to the taste buds, but you can never go wrong with things like butterscotch, because it’s made with ingredients like sugar and butter that are always available year-round in stock. It’s one of the few flavors that can be enjoyed without worries of adulteration.
Butterscotch is delicious with ice cream as it binds well together with vanilla, and the fat content present in the cream. It provides a wonderful mouthfeel, robust with flavor as it coats the insides of your mouth. The texture is rather grainy and gritty, but in a good way, something that’s found in a quality abundant praline ice cream. It is truly a luxurious flavoring and infusion to have in a chilled treat such as that. But a well-made butterscotch slurry doesn’t always go well with just any ice cream.
The flavor philosophy
There are a ton of artificial flavorings out there that give an overpowering sweet burn to the taste buds, but you can never go wrong with the sweet stuff like butterscotch, because it’s made with ingredients like sugar and butter that are always available year-round in stock. It’s one of the few flavors that can be enjoyed all the time without thinking too much about it being too sweet or artificial in nature. It’s a philosophy everybody must know while choosing a flavor. Haven’t you always wondered that commercial, strawberry flavored ice cream tastes different than actual strawberry ice cream? Or mango flavor tastes too mulled, dull, and too sweet? Or sometimes chocolate ice cream doesn’t even taste like chocolate!
The reason to that is because it’s the ‘flavor’ that’s being added and not necessarily the actual ingredient itself. A difference what many consumers don’t know is that ‘flavored’ is quite different from the factual ingredient sad on the package. You may be often deceived by the packaging from what it says vs. what is actually means. For example, if the label says ‘strawberry flavored’ it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s got strawberries in it. Instead, it uses flavoring agents, chemical compounds that mimic the aroma and taste of strawberries. There are distinct flavor compounds present in food that our taste receptors detect to help us identify what we’re eating, some are easy to spot and some are a bit trickier, but nonetheless our taste buds have a mind of their own.
Hack the label
To help you with choosing the best ice cream out there for yourself, let’s learn to first hack the label! Now, ingredients at the back of the label are listed according to their weight, so you need to look at the first three ingredients depending upon the type of product. For consumable goods the first three ingredients in the list are considered as the main items, it dictates what you’re going put in your tummy.
So, when it comes to differentiating between real ice cream and ‘ice creams desserts’, you have to check the ingredients label. And, yes there’s a difference, they’re both different things. Real ice cream has cream, milk, and sugar as the top three items on the list, whereas ice cream desserts are usually labelled as ‘chilled treats’ and are often cheaper, they have mostly vegetable oil, milk, and sugar. The rest of the list includes flavors, emulsifiers, stabilizers, color, fragrance agents, and preservatives.
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