Sweet Science - Earl Grey with White Chocolate

Earl Gray with White Chocolate - Earl Grey Tea Ice Cream with White Chocolate Stracciatella

Today is another pint from the Saint Paul based Sweet Science brand.  It is a seasonal flavor which I picked up at their latest tasting called Earl Grey with White Chocolate.   March is the time for Earl Grey tea?  Who knew?  This is actually the second pint that I've had which features Earl Grey tea.  I had a pint of McConnell's last year.  I will direct you there for a background on Earl Grey tea.

This year Sweet Science implemented their white chocolate mix-in differently.  They did it as a stracciatella.  The name stracciatella originally refers to a type of Italian egg drop soup.   You slowly  drizzle a seasoned egg mixture into the hot soup leaving little shreds of cooked egg immersed in the soup.  With ice cream, you slowly drizzle melted chocolate into churning ice cream leaving little shreds of chocolate immersed in the ice cream.  I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Removing the lid shows the light beige color of the Earl Grey base.  I don't see any of the white chocolate right away.  Digging in, the tea flavor in the base is quite noticeable and quite delicious.  You can really taste the bergamot orange.  The white chocolate stracciatella is hard to see it was everywhere.  The pieces were small and quite crunchy.  They were in every spoonful, almost to the extent of forming a web-like lattice within the ice cream.  The ice cream itself was still creamy, but there was so much crunch, too.  I have mentioned before that white chocolate is a bit of an inert flavor for me -- it does not add or subtract much, at least for my palate.  That said, I like its use here.  It provides something fun to crunch on without distracting at all from the excellent flavor of the Earl Grey tea.  (Note that McConnell's did something similar with their choice of shortbread cookies as a complementary mix-in for their Earl Grey flavor.)

Astute readers may have picked up that this stracciatella method of pouring melted chocolate into churning ice cream is actually similar to what Graeter's does for their signature chips (see video links is this old review).  The effect here is quite different, though.  Graeters chips are large and chewy while this stracciatella method creates an inner network of thin and crunchy chocolate strips.  I like both.

This was an excellent pint of ice cream.  The Earl Grey flavor is very well done.  Tea lovers should certainly check this out for the tea flavoring alone.  I can't get enough of this stracciatella, either.  I guess Sweet Science has a summer flavor which uses non-white chocolate instead.  I can't wait to try that one out as well.