Ice-cream Review: Sara Lee’s Caramel Peanut Brittle ¹

by QuestionFox • Food, Review • Tags: dessert, food, ice-cream, sweet

Look­ing for a deca­dent ice-cream, it can be easy to go straight for the choco­late, but that may not always be the best choice. There are plenty of options out there, which is espe­cially good for those who are caf­feine sen­si­tive and have to cross choco­late off their shop­ping lists.

Recently while look­ing for some­thing new to try, I came across Sara Lee’s Caramel Peanut Brit­tle. I ordered it dur­ing one of my exper­i­ments with buy­ing gro­ceries online, and sad to say, the ice-cream arrived soft and almost liq­uid. As I stared down at the gooey mess, I felt it would be a lit­tle unfair to use a half-melted and refrozen tub for review pur­poses, but when I later sam­pled the prop­erly frozen ice-cream, I found it didn’t seem any worse for wear. There were no trapped ice crys­tals (which cre­ates a crunchy, watery taste) — instead the tex­ture was just as smooth and creamy as I could expect.

The ice-cream appears a pleas­antly clean, pale vanilla colour, dot­ted with darker pieces of brit­tle. You are lucky to get more than a piece or two of brit­tle in a large spoon­ful, but the pieces them­selves are enjoy­ably crunchy — either hard crunchy bursts of caramel, or more bis­cuitty clus­ters of caramel and peanut. I would have enjoyed a lit­tle more of the peanut clus­ters, as they seemed few and far between, and when encoun­tered were very enjoyable.

Not to say that any part of this ice-cream is flawed — even if the brit­tle is sparse, the ice-cream itself is still great qual­ity. Creamy, and nei­ther dense or too airy, it remained close to my pre­ferred ice-cream tex­ture despite it’s adven­tures in the back of a deliv­ery van. And while sweet, it did not leave any gummy, or over-sweet chem­i­cally flavours coat­ing the mouth like some ice-creams — instead it left a clean, sweet, dairy flavour and remained flavour­ful even after rather thor­ough tast­ing! The pack­ag­ing men­tioned ‘rich swirls of fudge sauce’ but I didn’t seem to notice or taste these all that much, and I think they would be overkill anyway.

At 6.1g of sat­u­rated fat per 100g, it’s not a diet treat, but then that is not what I look for in ice-cream in any case. Sara Lee’s Caramel Peanut Brit­tle is an extrav­a­gant change from the usual choco­late fare, while still mild enough to be used with other flavours (I think it would be delight­ful on pan­cakes or in a banana sundae!).

Sara Lee Caramel Peanut Brit­tle — pur­chased from Wool­worths for $5.98 for a 1 litre tub — this was an online store spe­cial, and may be more expen­sive in-store.