High Road Craft Ice Cream & Sorbet is an Atlanta based company turning out high quality premium ice creams and sorbets since April 2010. While strolling through my local Whole Foods recently, I stumbled upon a nice selection of High Road ice creams. After several minutes of debating, I picked up a pint of High Road Brown Butter Praline and eagerly headed home to try this new treat. High Road provides a tastefully description of this ice cream: The term "brown butter" seems to be popping up everywhere these days, but the technique has been around for as long as we've known butter. The French call it beurre noisette, noting its similarity to the aroma of freshly roasted hazelnuts. We blend it into a slow cooked cream caramel and ribbon it into our sweet cream ice cream while we "make it rain" with sugar roasted praline pecans.
In 2012, High Road took home the “Flavor of Georgia” Grand Prize with their Brown Butter Praline Ice Cream, beating out 25 other competitors from around the state. The first thing I noticed about this ice cream was the consistency of the base. It melted almost instantly once taken out of the freezer. This had me slightly worried at first, but after several bites, I was reluctantly surprised. The “sweet cream” base is incredibly creamy and almost identical to that of the old fashioned homemade ice cream that I grew up eating every summer.
The brown butter caramel swirl was blended nicely into the base and present throughout the pint; adding even more sweetness to the ice cream. This might throw off others who don’t enjoy overly sweet ice cream bases, but the base is what saved this pint for me. High Road claims to “make it rain” with sugar roasted praline pieces. Well, they failed. Maybe I had a bad pint but the lack of actual praline pieces found in this pint really let me down. With the addition of larger, and many, many, more pralines, this pint could easily be elevated to an A. Even though the base was really creamy and tasted homemade, I unfortunately can’t rate this ice cream higher than a C. I would possibly consider rescooping this flavor in the future but definitely not anytime soon. All in all I was a little disappointed with my first High Road experience, but will give them another try in the future with a different flavor.
Where Colby Found It: Whole Foods
Colby's Grade: C
