Pumphouse Creamery - Door County Sour Cherry

Door County Sour Cherry - Door County Sour Cherries Swirled into Madagascar Vanilla Ice Cream

It has been a while since I had been to the Pumphouse Creamery so I went down and picked up a few seasonal flavors.  The first flavor is called Door County Sour Cherry.  If you are not familiar, Door is the name of a county and peninsula in Wisconsin.  The peninsula juts out into Lake Michigan and separates Green Bay from the rest of the lake.  It is a popular vacation spot for people within reasonable driving distance.  It is particularly well known for having beautiful fall colors this time of year.

What I did not know before researching for this review is that Door County is also known for apples and cherries.  Cherry trees have been abundant since the nineteenth century and they named a local regional airstrip after these trees.  The sour cherry is a variety of cherry which produces a smaller tree with a fruit that is more acidic than the sweet cherry.   The particular type of sour cherry which Door County is famous for is the Montmorency cherry -- a brighter red colored sub-variety of sour cherry which is ideal for pie-making and other desserts.  I found an interesting article about Door County and these cherries here.  This ice cream flavor mixes those cherries with a vanilla base.  Sounds promising.

Removing the lid shows bright red cherries sitting on top of the vanilla base.  It's one of the most beautiful top-of-the-pint displays I have seen yet.  The cherries are coated in their own sauce and some of that sauce has bled into the base a bit.  Digging in, the cherries are quite delicious.  It tastes like really good cherry pie filling.  Don't be scared away by the sour label in the flavor name.  There is a little bit of tartness in the finish of the flavor but not overly so.  There is plenty of vanilla around to balance the cherries.  With clumps of cherries reappearing every so often.  Check out the pictures below, this is a beautiful pint of ice cream.

I really enjoyed this pint of ice cream.  It is an excellent blend of cherry pie-filling and vanilla ice cream.  The closest flavor that I can find in my previous reviews is Häagen-Dazs's Cherry Vanilla flavor -- though it is not a perfect match because Häagen-Dazs uses black cherries while sour cherries are used here.  As much as I enjoyed that flavor, this flavor from Pumphouse is a level or two better than that one.  This feels so fresh and homemade.  Anyone who likes cherry pie à la mode will love this.