Summer Ice Cream Tour

On Saturday the whole family piled into the mini van and set off for the Fussy Little Blog Tour de Soft Serve - Schenectady Edition.

I learned a lot about my feelings on soft serve. I used to always get a vanilla cone. And then I would eat it relatively quickly and not pay much attention to it. But if you really taste vanilla soft serve, it is nothing special. So after the first tour, I thought I liked a vanilla/chocolate twist better. Neither the chocolate or vanilla was great, but together their sum seemed to be larger than the parts. Now after participating in 3 of these soft serve tours, I think I'm leaning towards vanilla or chocolate soft serve isn't worth the time. Other soft serve flavors might be, but vanilla and choclate are just cold on a summer day. There isn't much special about them.

With these tours, I usually do a break down of how we scored everything and look for any comments  that might provide insight into how each one of us ranked the ice cream. But it is hot out and I'm going to be lazy because in the end, we all picked the same place as the best. And of the tour participants (I think there were 11 on tour), we were the only 4 to pick this place as our favorite of the day.

What we ended up doing was getting the same order at each place and sharing. The order was 1 kiddie sized chocolate/vanilla twist, 1 kiddie sized chocolate/vanilla twist with rainbow sprinkles, and 1 kiddie sized vanilla. The cost ranged from $6.90 to $7.50. In general, I thought they were all decent values because I end up buying soft serve at Guptil's (it is near some softball fields), and while there is never a line because it is very well staffed, ice cream isn't cheap there. It is not uncommon for me to be sitting there wishing we had all got our own half gallon at Stewart's.

Dairy Circus

Jumpin' Jacks

 

Poppy's

Curry Freeze

 

Grandstand

If I am not mindlessly eating soft serve and focusing on the flavor I don't notice the metallic aftertaste. Ever place seems to have it. At least to me. My kids thought I was weird and didn't notice it. But comparing soft serve to soft serve, we all liked Curry Freeze the best. And if I went to any of these places again, I wouldn't get the chocolate or vanilla soft serve.  Tune into Fussy Little Blog for the official results coming sometime this week. I don't remember which  place won, but I can tell you our family block vote did not pick the winner.