Author: Tess Koman

The sky is usually blue, the grass is usually green, and raspberries are, about 98% of the time, disgusting garbage thimbles of mold. These are all things we universally know to be true! And while the sky should usually be blue and the grass should usually be green, I’m not convinced raspberries should usually be inedible squishes of bloody despair. 

Fresh off a series of blueberry storage tests, I recently turned my attention to the little lumpy melted puddles of red manganese I love so dearly but have never been able to maintain for more than a day or two. Could there be a world in which (1) the sky was blue, (2) the grass was green, (3) and raspberries were…Delicious? Edible?? Juicy??? Easy to pick up???? Easy to pick up without accidentally splattering yourself and everyone around you????? Delicious, edible, juicy, easy to pick up (with or without accidentally splattering yourself and everyone without you) FOR MORE THAN TWO DAYS AFTER YOU BRING THEM HOME!!!!!!!????????

…There could! Step into my office.

What We Know About Raspberries and Raspberry Storage

Raspberries, like strawberries, are aggregate fruits. They are picked at the peak of their ripeness and have a famously short shelf life. (Check out this 1935 study from the University of Minnesota about these two “most perishable of horticultural crops” and how their post-picking lives compare. It’s a trippy blast to read!) 

Though they are both highly perishable once picked, raspberries are even more delicate than strawberries—a lot of the literature around storing them properly and harvesting best practices centers around their fragility. Whether this is because they are simply a more delicate fruit or because they have a gaping hole in their middles and innumerable crevices that allow for moisture and contaminants to penetrate every bit of the fruit, I cannot tell, but…they’re just tender little guys! What I do know is that I’m always disappointed by the condition I find them in if they’ve been in my fridge for more than a minute.

The Tests

Given what we know about how delicate and permeable raspberries are, I outlined a series of tests of different methods meant to combat their fleeting impermanence.

As I did with my blueberry tests, I began by separating the berries into 30-gram batches and removing anything moldy or even slightly squishy and/or leaking so as to set all these berries up for success. I compared laying the berries out in a single layer against piling them up to test whether spreading them out would keep them from disintegrating under each other's weight. To see if I could combat their leakiness, I tested various unlined containers against ones lined with paper towels. As for extending their shelf life as much as possible, I played around with temperature and placement in the fridge to see if I could crack some kind of as-of-yet-undiscovered raspberry fountain of youth. 

I was most curious about the (below) bolded methods. The first method is what most major producers recommend for storing their raspberries; the other, the Harolod McGee method, has been proven to be the most effective berry-storing method by other powerhouses who’ve written on the subject for this very website. I tried to jostle the raspberries as minimally as humanly possible in the process of getting these experiments set up, which is what the North American Raspberry & Blackberry Association recommends for the freshest-tasting berries.

• Unrinsed, in their original clamshell plastic packaging, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, in their original clamshell plastic packaging, lined with paper towel, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, sorted by color/ripeness, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, arranged in a shallow bowl in a single layer, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, arranged in a shallow bowl in a single layer, lined with paper towel, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, in their original plastic clamshell packaging, in the crisper
• Unrinsed, arranged in a shallow bowl in a single layer, in the crisper
• Unrinsed, arranged in a shallow bowl in a single layer, lined with paper towel, in the crisper
• Unrinsed, in cardboard packaging, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, in cardboard packaging, lined with paper towel, in the fridge
• Washed in hot water, dried delicately in a colander, placed in original clamshell plastic packaging, in the fridge (Harold McGee method)
• McGee method, take two: hot water-washed, dried delicately in a colander, placed in original clamshell plastic packaging, lined with paper towel, in the fridge
  

The Results

As suspected, these tests went real quick. The first raspberries to go were the “unrinsed, in their original plastic clamshell packaging, in the crisper” berries—at the start of day two, I spotted mold. I also found the paper towel-lined refrigerated McGee berries to be dubious around the same time, though they held out another day before taking a tragic turn.

Everything else reached a tipping point by the end of day three. If I could go back in time—had I known that the berries would be beyond salvageable after their third day—I’d have enjoyed all the berries then.

By day four, only the following raspberries were still viable:

• Unrinsed, in their original clamshell plastic packaging, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, in their original clamshell plastic packaging, lined with paper towel, in the fridge
• Unrinsed, arranged in a shallow bowl in a single layer, in the fridge
• McGee method: hot water–washed, dried delicately in a colander, placed in original clamshell plastic packaging, in the fridge

The paper towel from the second method from the above group was completely soaked through by this point, but the raspberries had only lost about three percent of their mass. The hot water-treated raspberries were flatter and softer than the others, but they otherwise were still fine—no mold, leakage, or other signs of decay I actually would’ve loved to smash them onto a peanut butter-laden carb that day and had myself a nice little snack.

By day six, the top three tests listed above were visibly much more beautiful and intact than all the rest. The same remained true on day seven, though all of the raspberries were less vibrant than when I’d originally stored them. By the end of the experiment, husband (without knowing what the experiments were) believed the paper towel-lined, original clamshell berries were the prettiest ones of all. I found the completely untouched ones and the unrinsed ones I’d placed in a shallow, open bowl to be the ones I gravitated toward.

By day eight, everything was withering, slimy, moldy, or all of the above.

The Conclusions

…If you buy raspberries, plan to eat them within the first few days after purchase no matter how you plan to store them. From there, you have a few options:

If you’re feeling “lazy” you should be able to extend the life of your raspberries to about five days:

• Remove any moldy berries from original packaging.
• Store remaining raspberries in the fridge in the original container if it's a plastic clamshell. If your raspberries come in a cardboard carton, you should transfer the berries to a clean, dry container. If you don’t even want to do that, you should assume you have, at most, three days to consume them.
• Rinse well (and gently pat dry) right before consuming.

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can likely extend the life of your raspberries to about seven-to-nine days:

• Remove any moldy berries from original packaging.
• Gently remove berries from their container. Double-line the container (or a shallow bowl) with paper towels. Put the berries back in the container in a single layer and refrigerate immediately.
• Rinse well (and gently pat dry) right before consuming.

At Serious Eats, we take the science of food storage—wait for it—seriously. I remember reading Kenji’s tomato storage article back in 2017 and immediately flipping all my tomatoes over, chastising my then-boyfriend for thinking I’d had a very strange momentary lapse of produce storing judgment. Daniel’s bread refrigeration piece changes lives regularly, per the feedback in our SE staff email inbox. And Genevieve’s deep-dive into the steps necessary to preserve strawberries remains a perennial top performer for the site, even in months it makes no sense to eat strawberries! 

So it stands to reason I’d take the official Serious Eats blueberry version of those experiments very—wait for it—seriously! And I did! If I wanted to determine the absolute best way to store blueberries for longevity, freshness, and flavor, I would have to be meticulous. Like, now-husband-rightfully-thinking-I’d-lost-my-whole-mind-re: produce meticulous!!

After a deep-dive into existing blueberry storage literature, a cross-reference of my green bean and cherry tests from last year, and a look into all mentions of produce storage on Serious Eats, I identified and set up a series of tests to determine the best way to store blueberries. I tested 18 different methods, including ones that supported existing theories about the best way to store blueberries, as well as those that directly opposed agreed upon methods. In addition to challenging accepted methods from the world outside of Serious Eats, I also put berry storage methods from the Serious Eats canon to the test to see if what worked for, say, strawberries, also worked for blueberries. The! Results! Will! Shock! You!

What We Know About Blueberries (and Blueberry Storage)

Blueberries are “true berries” in that they are fruits that come from the ovary of a single flower and have their seeds embedded inside their flesh. By this definition, strawberries and raspberries are not berries, but instead are aggregate fruits, which come from several carpels of the same flower. Blueberries have thicker skins than those aggregate fruits, and they have higher levels of anthocyanins—the water-soluble pigment responsible for the fruits’ color—than juuust about any other "berry" (elderberries and mulberries being the exceptions). 

A September 2014 Postharvest Biology and Technology study confirms that the most salient factor leading to blueberry demise (see: shriveled or burst fruit due to moisture loss) is temperature. The higher the temperature, the more accelerated the fruits’ metabolism. The higher the metabolic rate that occurs, the likelier it is that blueberries will lose moisture and begin to break down.

The Tests

Considering all the above, I strongly suspected that a  good chunk of the berries I tested, including the blueberries left at room temperature, wouldn’t yield the greatest results. 

I first removed all the berries from the package and picked through them to remove any bad berries from the batch. Then I divided them into batches and proceeded with the tests outlined below.

• Unrinsed blueberries in their original packaging at room temperature
• Rinsed blueberries in their original packaging at room temperature
• Unrinsed blueberries in their original packaging in the fridge
• Rinsed blueberries in their original packaging in the fridge
• Unrinsed blueberries in their original packaging in the crisper
• Rinsed blueberries in their original packaging in the crisper
• Unrinsed blueberries in a shallow bowl in the fridge
• Rinsed blueberries in a shallow bowl in the fridge
• Unrinsed blueberries in a shallow bowl in the crisper
• Rinsed blueberries in a shallow bowl in the crisper
• Blueberries soaked in a vinegar bath, then rinsed, then dried in a shallow bowl in the fridge
• Blueberries soaked in a vinegar bath, then rinsed, then dried in a shallow bowl in the crisper
• Unrinsed blueberries in an airtight container in the fridge
• Rinsed blueberries in an airtight container in the fridge
• Unrinsed blueberries in an airtight container in the crisper
• Unrinsed blueberries in an airtight container in the crisper (just for fun, really)
• Blueberries washed in hot (125°F) water, drained, dried delicately but completely in a salad spinner triple-lined with paper towels, placed back in their original container, and stored on a shelf in the fridge.

The two tests I was most confident in were the third and the last ones listed above. The third—unrinsed blueberries stored in their original packaging in the refrigerator —most logically follows all existing blueberry guidance. The latter—rinsing in hot water, drying thoroughly, and storing in the fridge— is exactly Genevieve’s proven strawberry storage winner, as it is Kenji’s before her and Harold McGee’s before him. The idea behind this hot water application (as opposed to just leaving the berries alone) is that you can ward off mold and extend their shelf lives.

The Results

In my first batch of tests, the unwashed blueberries thrown in the fridge went a full nine days before I noticed any sign of decay or mold. They’d barely lost weight at that point too. Honestly, I would’ve fed them to my toddler up until about day 11. Conversely, my hot water-washed berries felt soft nearly immediately after their bath. I gave them until day four (and a ~16% drop in mass) before giving up on them completely. It’s worth noting Kenji doesn’t specify this technique is most appropriate for blueberries in his original produce-washing investigation. He tested it on blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries (all of which are aggregate fruits, I should add? Maybe!?). 

After my tests were complete, Genevieve and Daniel ran follow-up tests of my winning storage method—the unwashed, original packaging one—against the hot water method. Genevieve had similar results to mine; Daniel, who was testing on beautiful farmers market berries, found no difference in batches across many days (he ultimately had to cut his tests short for PTO reasons).

Genevieve, Daniel, and I have run theories about anthocyanins and water solubility back and forth for weeks since then. Are these hyper-pigmented fruits a bad idea to wash because you’re actively ruining them in the process? We know the stability of anthocyanins are also impacted by temperature. Is that why the hot water bluebs fared much more poorly than my room temp-rinsed ones, which, on average lasted about six days before mold sightings!? Or maybe Daniel had a different variety of blueberry! Maybe his were just fresher than mine and Genevieve's! Maybe when you're not dealing with freshest blueberry—even if it looks good!—you're dealing with enough deterioration on a microscopic level that the hot water rinse just ruins everything. 

I spoke to Professor Penelope Perkins-Veazie, who is cited repeatedly in the first study linked above here, via email, and she noted: “Anthocyanins are generally regarded as highly water soluble (around 80%), but because blueberries are quite complex in anthocyanins and other flavonoids, I don't know if the [two are related]. As far as longevity, such as storage life, I'm pretty sure that there has been no work to look specifically at the shelf life and amount of anthocyanin in blueberry.”

Conclusions: How to Store Blueberries So They Last Longer

All this to say: The easiest way to ensure you’ll have fresher blueberries for longer is to get them into the fridge exactly as you bought them as quickly as possible. (Worth mentioning: My countertop blueberries went to hell in literally four hours on an East Coast morning in July.) But if you’re looking to feel better about mold spores and don’t need to keep your blueberries around for the week, go ahead and give them a hot rinse and a thorough dry. To recap, here's the simplest and best way to store blueberries:

• Remove any moldy berries from original packaging.
• Store remaining blueberries (in that same packaging) in the fridge. (If your blueberries come in a cardboard carton and that carton becomes damp, you should transfer the berries to a clean, dry container after removing any moldy berries.)
• Rinse well right before consuming.

Upon returning from a recent vacation and hearing a pretzel taste test had taken place in his absence, Daniel pinged me to ask: “Were the results messy? I’d guess they would be.” It took me a beat to realize that he wasn’t talking about, like, a fun-filled day in a crumb-strewn kitchen requiring a thorough sweeping. Instead, he was suggesting that most pretzels taste more or less the same most of the time and therefore our taste test results should not be conclusive. 

But are all pretzels created equal? Or are pretzels nuanced snowflakes with a range of textures, flavors, and levels of salt and alkalinity? To arrive at an answer, the SE team pulled together seven brands of good, old-fashioned snacky pretzels you're likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best.

There was a clear winner! There was a clear—well, we don’t do “losers.” But there were ones that were very clearly not the winner(s)! And then there were a bunch of very enjoyable pretzels right in the middle, ones we'd mindlessly eat without a second thought if we weren't very deliberately scrutinizing them in a taste test.

Anyway! It was a productive exercise. Now we can all make informed pretzel-buying decisions together. Shall we? 

Ed. Note: We wanted to try Herr’s and Uncle Jerry’s pretzels to no avail. I am begging you, once again, to understand that we do not have a West Coast correspondent (or an excited editorial assistant) to help us procure these things!! But we do truly love the feedback. Keep it coming!! Xx.

The Contenders

• Bachman Thin’n Right Pretzels
• Brad’s Organic Mini Pretzels
• Rold Gold Tiny Twists
• Snack Factory Pretzel Chips
• Snyder’s of Hanover Mini Pretzels
• Utz Classic Thins
• Wegman’s Mini Pretzels
  

The Criteria

A good pretzel is a thing of subtlety and refinement. It is salty, for sure, but it is also lightly sweet—not sweet like dessert, but sweet in the way sandwich bread grows sweet the longer you chew it. Often, the sweetness has a hint of malt to it. (In a sneak-peak of our results, we can now say with confidence that a pretzel that’s salty and malty is, in fact, better than one that’s merely salty and sweet.) That said, salty and malty should never become “salty and toasty,” which quickly devolves into, “Oh god, was there a fire at the pretzel factory??”

The salt should be present as small crystals atop the pretzel in an even distribution, but it should also very distinctly be coming from the pretzel dough. It can be a plus if a pretzel tastes subtly of butter, but never so much that you know in your heart that butter is artificial.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a good pretzel should have a deeply burnished brown exterior courtesy of a dip in an alkaline lye bath before baking. This is not only for looks; it's this alkaline surface treatment that is responsible for a pretzel's signature roasty, toast, weirdly pleasantly soapy flavor. (Science time: The strong alkaline bath speeds the Maillard reaction during baking, which is the reaction that drives the browning of bread crusts, seared steaks, and roasted vegetables, leading to such a well-developed and flavorful exterior despite a skinny little pretzel's relatively short cooking time.)

Size also factored into people’s preferences in that anything that took more than two bites to fully consume ended up at the bottom of these rankings. This could be because most tasters prefer a smaller pretzel's higher ratio of alkaline surface area to malty-sweet interior. Or it could be because smaller pretzels are thinner, leading to a crispier bite that doesn't wade into the crunchy-tough zone. Or maybe folks just like popping handfuls in their mouths all at once without discomfort, because isn't that what snacking is all about? 

In the end, it was a nice and salty day. Not our saltiest, for sure, but pleasantly and professionally salty all the same.

The Rankings

Bachman Thin’n Right Pretzels, 4.125/5

Mentions of the word “classic” abounded here. Did we get so far as to pull a “this is what I think of when I think of what a [pretzel] tastes like” from Genevieve? No, but she did write “Wow!” twice, once in reference to external salt levels and another praising the pretzels’ overall sturdiness. It was a little sweet! A little buttery! A little alkaline! And each pretzel was very easy to eat in 1.5-2 bites.

Rold Gold Tiny Twists, 3.79/5

OK, I wrote too soon. This is where Genevieve wrote: “This tastes like lye. It tastes like pretzels!” (She did then ask: “Is this Snyder’s?” which…more on that soon.) Everyone agreed there was a good amount of salt, as well as a gently buttery, toasty finish. The crunch was good, the salt was well-distributed—it was a party!

These were only knocked from top seeding because they weren’t not dry. Taste test guest star/Serious Eats product lead Alison wrote: “These have a nice glaze, but they take a while to chew. I just need water to help things along, that’s all!” (We did not go into this test expecting dryness to be a differentiating factor among pretzels—aren't all snack-bag pretzels equally dry, and isn't that a good thing?—but something about the texture of some pretzels made them seem more dry to our tasting panel than others in a way that wasn't perceived as totally pleasant. This is a good moment to remind readers that each taster goes through the samples in a randomized order, so the issue is probably not anything as simple as, "all pretzels seem too dry after the first few bites.")

Snyder’s of Hanover Mini Pretzels, 3/5

Snyder’s tasted and smelled distinctly bready, as though soft pretzels were in our future. They weren’t, and that was sad, but the rest of this pretzel-eating experience was so nice! Allison didn’t need water to push through, Kelli appreciated the snap and subsequent chew, and Genevieve again enjoyed the crunch. That said, we all found ourselves craving salt after this sample, which, in a pretzel taste test, is guaranteed to knock you down a few.

Wegman’s Mini Pretzels, 2.97/5

It was here that the difference between a pleasant pretzel moment and a passable one became—as always, respectfully!!—abundantly clear. It was also here that I noticed that malt falls off ingredient lists (only the Snack Factory pretzels ranked below picks it back up again), a strong indicator that maltiness is a critical component of a great pretzel, and products that lack it are less likely to please. The butter aftertaste here was nice, but it was also distinctly artificial. The alkalinity was satisfying, but only once you’d had three or four pretzels. The salt was there, but it wasn’t enough or heartily textured. The yeast was—well, truthfully, one of our testers said these tasted alcoholic. Not…a bad thing? Just something almost certainly worth noting.

Utz Classic Thins, 2.88/5

These were dry enough that they were a challenge to chew and swallow, and, as Amanda so fittingly wrote: “I’m just now realizing that’s not what I want from my pretzels.” The dryness did allow for a level of crunch three-fifths of our testers enjoyed, but, to quote Amanda again, “it was a sad crunch.” Still, Allison and Genevieve both mentioned the salt crystals were the perfect size to satisfy their salt cravings.

Snack Factory Pretzel Chips, 2.79/5

I did throw this little curveball into the taste test thinking I’d end up in five different fights about what qualifies as a pretzel (and don’t worry—I did!), but what people struggled with here was the sweetness. Each and every person identified an immediate “honey-like” taste upon first bite, as well as a honeyed aftertaste that lingered. That sweetness overwhelmed just about any notice of saltiness or alkalinity. One of the tasters also said these were so sharp upon first bite she was worried “a corner would jut into the roof of my mouth??”

Brad’s Organic Mini Pretzels, 2.33/5

We love and appreciate Brad, but we can also, in good faith, have questions for him about his plain and disintegrating pretzels! For starters: How! Also: Why?

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion among tasters that could influence results. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

It’s not too late to turn back. You can make the decision right now to move your life forward, unburdened by…what lies in front of you. Because what lies in front of you is a lot of very charged words about coffee ice cream, a thing you presumably love and have strong feelings about. 

…We do too! That’s why we wanted to warn you upfront.

Alas, recently, the Serious Eats team pulled together nine brands of coffee ice cream you're likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we…well, we loved the idea of every minute of doing it! The reality was another story.

The Contenders

• Adirondack High Peak Perk Coffee Bean
• Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Toffee
• Breyers Coffee Ice Cream
• Del’s Dairy Farm & Ice Cream Co. Coffee Toffee
• Friendly’s Coffee Ice Cream
• Häagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream
• McConnell’s Coffee Ice Cream
• Turkey Hill Colombian Coffee Ice Cream
• Wegman’s Premium Coffee Ice Cream

The Criteria

A good coffee ice cream should eat like you’re drinking a cup of coffee. It, under no circumstances, should eat like you’re eating a cup of coffee. It should be easy! Pleasant! Delicious! If you are sitting there going: “Why on earth would she feel the need to say such a thing?” please consider yourself blessed to have never happened upon a ground-, bean-, and/or coffee-related chunk-filled scoop. This was the clearest common denominator amongst our winners—there! was! nothing! in! them! Anything with even a fleck in it—regardless of the ice cream’s hue—landed in the bottom half of our rankings. In fact, this distinction was so clear that the numerical rankings ran the whooole gamut of the scale, which almost never happens. I normally sit here and say things like “haha we all just love peanut butter no matter what, I guess!” No! Our love of coffee ice cream is deeply, deeply conditional and that condition is “no nonsense in the ice cream!!”

Anyway! That same ice cream should taste more like coffee than it does like milk, but that milky creaminess must be present. If there are other flavors present, they should be vanilla or caramel, but none of those flavors should in any way interfere with the coffee of it all. 

God, I’m wound up! Almost like I’ve been consuming a lot of coffee!! A perfect time to introduce the ratings.

The Rankings

Häagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream, 4/5

It doesn’t bring me joy to be A Person Who References The Office at work, but you know that episode where the whole cohort is tallying how many ways Phyllis can describe the way a perfect rainy day makes her feel? Each and every tester ate this sample and proceeded to write something gorgeously cheesy about how content this ice cream made them feel. I will pick on Genevieve specifically for this blurb, because her tasting notes best help me make my point here while still discussing the ice cream productively: “Love the creamy texture, really smooth! This is the only one so far that I have finished the entire sample of. Is this Häagen-Dazs? It’s got such a nice color. I feel like I’m sitting down to enjoy a cup of coffee on a windowsill with a good book. It’s making me feel so many things!”

Friendly’s Coffee Ice Cream, 3.56/5

A decidedly milkier experience than a coffee-ier one, this option ate smoothly and was the color of “cafe con leche with a little too much leche,” Kelli wrote. It was exactly the consistency of ice cream you’d hope would be the base of your diner milkshake or paired with an Irish coffee. I’ve also lost count at this point of how many taste tests we’ve conducted in which a "premium" brand lands first place and an unserious brand (said with affection!) of yore falls decidedly in second; I am out of jokes about how the Serious Eats team needs to pop some magnesium and listen to a Celine Dion album while sitting on the floor. 

Wegman’s Coffee Ice Cream, 3.33/5

Another bronze medal for Wegman’s! Comments on this store brand always, without exception, remark on beautiful bounce and chew. Genevieve wrote that it was “really smooth and creamy; slightly stretchy, but not unpleasantly so!” This was also the boldest, deepest color of the bunch. Dark roast-y! As for the actual flavor, all notes pointed toward a heavier coffee presence, some even going so far as to remark on a coffee syrup/extract flavor.

Turkey Hill Coffee Ice Cream, 3.25/5

Well, I never! In the past few tests, Turkey Hill has performed decidedly poorly—these editors have exclusively found it to be too foamy, too mildly flavored, and just not satisfying. In coffee world, though, that subtlety was a positive. Kelli even went so far as to say this ice cream was “probably the only one I’d eat again,” calling the underlying sweetness “wonderful” with caramel undertones. To be fair, Kelli had never had coffee ice cream before, and all other testers that day found this to be a milder coffee offering.

Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Toffee, 3.25/5

In Ben & Jerry’s defense, we searched high and low for Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz and were only met with this option at three different grocery stores in the vicinity. That said, everyone always enjoys the heft and fresh dairy energy brought forth by a scoop of B&J’s. “The random bits and bobs” of toffee woven throughout this option were “a bit unexpected but not unpleasant,” Amanda thought. It made the whole experience sweeter than testers were hoping for, though, and firmly planted it into “not what [we] think of when [we] think of ‘coffee ice cream’” territory.

Del’s Dairy Farm & Ice Cream Co. Coffee Toffee, 2.9/5

Same notes here as with the Ben & Jerry’s ones right above this, just with more mentions of caramel frapps and imminent toothaches. Smooth! Nicely melty! Really creamy! Just achingly sweet.

Breyers Coffee Ice Cream, 2.5/5

The palest, latte-like color of the batch, which in turn translated to the least present coffee flavor of all. In fact, after some bites, it wasn’t terribly clear that this was a coffee ice cream? It was, like, vague coffee ice cream? Kelli, who at this point decided she does not really like coffee ice cream, wrote: “If you told me this was off-brand amaretto, I would believe you.” That said, it was plenty frothy! And that’s a part of coffee, so!

Adirondack High Peak Perk Coffee Bean, 1.33/5

OK so, they really heard “coffee” and went “find me all the coffee you can. No no, don’t do anything to it, just get it into the ice cream. No!! I don’t care if it looks like that!! Just put all the coffee in the ice cream.” So, listen. If you want some sandy, almost-certainly caffeinated coffee ice cream, this is for you. It was not for our editors, who wrote things like “If I wanted to eat my coffee machine, I would” and “IT LITERALLY IS LIKE A MOUTHFUL OF COFFEE GROUNDS.”

McConnell’s Coffee Ice Cream, 1.25/5

Same thing as Adirondack, but with even more coffee. In fact, legend goes that the Serious Eats editorial team still hasn’t slept or known peace to this day.

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

When’s the last time you chose your potato chips? The answer is: never! You don’t choose potato chips! Potato chips choose you. They come for you at some point around the first of your grandma’s annual Labor Day barbecues that you remember and then you’re drawn, moth to flame, to the same [redacted, crunch-less bite-sized paper bits] each time you find yourself in the chip aisle.

*Whispers* It doesn’t have to be this way... The world of potato chips is vast and nuanced. You can change things for your children by making better choices/picking up a different bag of chips for this year’s gathering. Be!! The change!! You want to see!!!!! In the world!!!!!!

And so, out of this deep-rooted sense for public service, the Serious Eats team recently pulled together nine brands of original-flavor (a.k.a. plain, unflavored, but not unsalted)  potato chips you're likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of it…while complaining throughout that we should’ve made tuna melts to go with these piles of chips and also that  salt & vinegar is a better time than plain chips!

The Contenders

• Cape Cod Original Kettle Cooked Potato Chips 
• Deep River Snacks Potato Chips, Kettle Cooked, Original Salted
• Hal’s Original Flavor Chips
• Herr’s Potato Chips, Crisp ’n Tasty
• Kettle Brand Sea Salt Potato Chips
• Lay’s Classic Potato Chips
• Siete Sea Salt Potato Chips
• Utz Original Potato Chips
• Wise Potato Chips, Golden, Original

The Criteria

A good original potato chip is—and let me be the first one to say this—crunchy. Yeah, I said crunchy before I said “potato-y!” The crunch and the salt matter more than the potato of it all!! You’ll know you’ve encountered a quality potato chip when the following series of events occur, exactly in this order:

1. You and the person across the table hear a crunch upon first bite. 
2. You immediately know that chip won’t be your last in this sitting. 
3. You see or feel no need to wipe your hands of grease before you reach for a second chip.
4. You eat the second chip; you let slip involuntarily, from the bowels of something deep and unknown inside of you: “Oh god, I’m in love with these.” The person across the table from you confirms: “Oh god, I know, same.”
5. You unwittingly slap at a pile of napkins after chip four to clear that delicious afterthought of grease.
6. You find that 12 fluid ounces of a soda in the vicinity quenches you exactly of your thirst.

Anyway! To level the playing field of ALL AVAILABLE CHIPS, we zeroed in on original flavor, non-ridged potato-only chips. No other veggies, no other flavors—just potatoes and just salt (and the oil the potatoes were fried in, of course). If you end up liking this particular batch of nonsense, we will move on to other (better) flavors and textures. Just say the word, my angry, DM-happy sweets!!

A few notes on our overall findings before we get on to the rankings: This group had a very clear-cut preference for a kettle-cooked, sea-salted chip. While I've listed the ingredients for each brand, I couldn’t correlate any particular frying oil to “a better chip,” though it’s worth noting that the only instance of avocado oil in the whooole bunch landed itself at the very bottom. I found nostalgia played less of a role than it seems to have in previous tests, which was fun!! Maybe everyone is generally feeling better about things? Hahahahahah!!

OK. Whatever. The chips! 

The Rankings

Kettle Brand Sea Salt Potato Chips, 4.16/5

Imagine a potato chip being so bold as to taste like a…potato! Et voila: these!! Each taster remarked on the pervasive-in-a-nice-way potato flavor, oftentimes noting in subsequent options that that same crucial flavor was lacking. These kettle-cooked chips were substantive, slightly greasy (Amanda said she’d expect to want to wash her hands after a handful of them), and LARGE. The latter prompted Genevieve to write in her notes: “These are practically the size of my palm! (Is this Kettle??)” Classic Genevieve. Classic potato chips!

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oils (canola and/or sunflower and/or safflower and/or soybean), sea salt.

Hal’s New York Original Flavor Chips, 3.83/5

Perhaps the only instance in which the immediately notable presence of oil felt correct rather than icky. They were “oily, but together with the super crispiness, it’s not a bad thing,” wrote one tester, while another called the oil "just right.” Now that I’m rereading these notes, I see no comments in the realm of saltiness or flavor, so…we’re going to call Hal’s (also kettle-cooked!) a fantastic option for those who like to ruin people in the vicinity’s lives via satisfying crunching and also don’t have time for more than a quick hands-to-pants wipe.

Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower oil, sea salt

Deep River Snacks Potato Chips, Kettle Cooked, Original Salted, 3.61/5

Our first heavy-weight contender! These chips, also kettle-cooked, didn’t melt after the first snap–they were substantial enough that you had to chew a little bit. They were appropriately salty, impressively crispy, and, again, pretty thick (...to the point that it was the only reason I could pinpoint these not ranking higher). Even still: This was the only chip of the bunch editors remarked they kept coming back to.

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one of more of the following: corn, cottonseed, sunflower, or canola oil), sea salt

Herr’s Potato Chips, Crisp ’n Tasty, 3.56/5

Distinctly savory, these morsels!! Like, to the point that “They barely remind me of a potato?” Kelli wrote. Genevieve even compared the experience to eating a cured egg yolk, which reflected in just about everyone’s numbers. Herr’s (again again again: kettle-cooked!) are a more interesting and nuanced option for those looking for flavor above crunch and grease. This is also the first appearance of regular old salt in the batch; the top-seeded picks called out "sea salt" on their labels. 

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (corn, cottonseed, sunflower), salt.

Lay’s Classic Potato Chips, 3.16/5

You can take a horse to water, but...nope, that’s not it. You can teach a person to fish, but...woof, no, not that one either. How does the saying go? “You can think you’ve put enough potato chips in front of a group of absurdly detail-oriented food nerds that they won't be able to ID Lay’s, but…they will see right through your ruse because Lay’s was the golden-ish yellow, oil-slicked, snackable sog of their youths?” Yeah, that’s the one. (OK, in all seriousness: Here we enter not kettle-cooked territory, as well as a distinct absence of sea salt!! They’ll both make a return toward the end, but…we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.) (Nailed that last one!!) Aside from clocking these as Lay's right away, the group didn't have a lot to say about these in their tasting feedback sheets.

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (sunflower oil, and/or corn oil, and/or canola oil), salt.

Wise Potato Chips, Golden, Original, 3.15/5

These tasted like Lay’s, but like if Lay’s had made a last-minute decision to throw the craveable-yet-manageable greasiness of their product out the window? More helpfully, Amanda wrote: “These tasted like a processed food that a ‘90s health PSA would warn against.” Helen noted an overwhelming oily aftertaste. This makes sense, as this was the chip with the most potential oils involved, per its ingredient list (“one or more” of no less than  five different oils).

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: corn, cottonseed, sunflower, soybean or canola oil), salt.

Utz Original Potato Chips, 3/5

To look at these is to think you’ve laid eyes on the Utopian Ideal of Potato Chips. And…they were very nice!! I think we all just hope that when we are re-defining “the perfect potato chip” (after society collapses and we begin rebuilding again, etc., etc.) that we will want said chips to taste fresh! And salty!

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: cottonseed oil, corn oil, and/or sunflower oil), salt.

Cape Cod Original Kettle Cooked Potato Chips, 2.83/5

The group’s tasting notes for these nearly identically mirrored those of their Deep River ones. The distinction was that these (which are kettle-cooked, btw!) were even thicker, which helped crystallize that our preference is a thinner-cut chip! I would go ahead and copy/paste everyone’s pithy lil notes from this one, but they all can be boiled down to: “Wow! Crunchy! Wow! Too thick?”

Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oils (canola and/or sunflower and/or safflower and/or  soybean), sea salt

Siete Sea Salt Potato Chips, 2.56/5

Contrastingly, the kettle-cooked Siete chips were so thin they practically melted, prompting everyone to comment on their sogginess. There was a prominent grease to the whole experience, enveloping an otherwise very nice potato flavor. This is the only one of the batch that used avocado oil. Related: I’m adding “avocado oil taste test” to my Q3 pitch list. :)

Ingredients: Potatoes, avocado oil, sea salt

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

We have been through so many taste tests together now. We’ve braved pounds of cream cheese. Mountains of butter. Puddles of peanut butter. And yet, no one on our team has been more excited for a  taste test than they were about our mint chocolate chip ice cream showdown. It’s pretty! It’s polarizing! It’s popular! It should, in theory, make a whole bunch of you very happy and/or very, very mad. And the internet needs more of that kind of fodder, don’t you think?

And so, the Serious Eats team recently pulled together 14 (!) brands of mint chocolate ice cream you're likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of doing it! Also, many of us felt very, very unwell after the fact. 

Ed. note: Van Leeuwen and Target’s Favorite Day were, among others on our sample lists, but we were unable to procure them the day of the test despite our best efforts. I can’t wait to hear about how much you love them, though, as well as all the other brands our nonexistent West Coast correspondent should have contributed to the test. Xo!

The Contenders

• Adirondack Creamery Whiteface Mint Chip
• Baskin Robbins Mint Chocolate Chip
• Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie Peppermint 
• Best Yet Mint Chocolate Chip
• Breyers Mint Chocolate Chip
• Edy’s Mint Chocolate Chip
• Friendly’s Mint Chocolate Chip
• Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip
• Häagen-Dazs Mint Chip
• Jeni’s Green Mint Chip
• McConnell’s Mint Chip
• Tillamook Mint Chocolate Chip
• Turkey Hill Mint Chocolate Chip
• Wegman’s Mint Chocolate Chip

The Criteria

A good mint chocolate chip ice cream is, and I want you to take a deep breath here, not too minty. Don’t get me wrong—it’s definitely minty! But if any part of you takes a bite and clenches because a tiny dentist is yelling at you in your head, you are not eating a nice mint chocolate chip ice cream. As with all our other ice cream taste tests, creaminess is important—wateriness is incorrect. Also important (perhaps equally so!) is that the chocolate present throughout is high-quality, evenly dispersed, and substantially chunky. In a lot of these samples, we encountered smaller shards drowning in ice cream, little squares that kinda clumped, and/or meteorites of chalky junk floating in the corner, waiting to take your tooth #16 out, sending you right back to the dentist as a fun, full-circle bit. 

Two things that surprised me: In a few instances, the team picked up on distinct minty-ness from the chips themselves, rather than the surrounding ice cream. Those instances did not correlate to high rankings! The ice cream should be nudgingly but distinctly minty, and the nice, uniform chocolate should be distinctly chocolatey. Secondly, we…don’t really care about color!? I went into the day intending to blindfold my coworkers to ensure they couldn’t let the color of the sample impede their opinions. It turns out there is no comfortable or appropriate way to blindfold your coworkers and force-feed them ice cream, so…they saw everything going into their mouths. And their top choices ran the gamut from stark white to gentle gray to greeeeeeen! What fun. 

Of note: Similarly to our chocolate ice cream taste test, we conducted this round on a sweltering and disgustingly humid NYC day. These ice creams were transported from all over the city and sat in a freezer I yanked open near-constantly over the course of the day. There was no way to preserve their textural integrity as we would’ve liked to, but…we did our best! And, as with the chocolate ice cream taste test, I built the uncontrollable variability of iciness/meltiness into the sampling templates, asking people to separate temperature side effects out of their rankings as much as possible.

The Rankings

Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie Peppermint, 3.87/5

This Ben & Jerry’s pint—which is a pleasant muddled greenish-gray—ate the way good skincare feels. It was viscous upon contact (in a luxurious way), it smelled good (in a nice afterthought–type way), and eating it felt like you were doing something nice for yourself (in a really uplifting way). I’m not suggesting every other mid-millennial out there reading this should begin slugging with Ben & Jerry’s mint chip, but I’m not not saying we all shouldn’t cleanse with this while we eat it. More relevant to this particular article, perhaps, is the fact that this sample felt very low on stabilizers but held its own nicely, particularly in contrast to the luxe and substantial chocolate-y cookie crumbles.

Baskin Robbins Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.43/5

Behold: the fourth consecutive Serious Eats taste test in which these predictable little monsters gave a deeply nostalgic offering the silver medal. Fascinating! It’s difficult to extrapolate the facts here: Is Baskin Robbins mint chip (a spearmint gum-green ice cream which was “very chocolate-y, and I do love that,” per our visuals director Amanda with a “fantastic chip-to-cream ratio,” per our product lead Alison) actually the second-best ice cream here or do my coworkers all need bi-weekly therapy? Hard to say!

Häagen-Dazs Mint Chip, 3.33/5

Another SE ice cream taste test top three staple: Häagen-Dazs! This particular flavor was creamy and sweet, and though it was one of only three without the word “chocolate” in its name, it featured luscious, chunky chunks that everyone took note of. These chunks even outshone the actual ice cream, to some. Amanda put it best: “These chips command a lot of attention.” TL:DR; if you’re looking for a mint-heavy, chocolate-light mint chocolate chip, this isn’t quite the one for you, but if you are a chocolate lover who likes a subtle mintiness, you’re probably going to love this one. Oh! And it’s snooow-white.

Wegman’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.35/5

Enough of a mixed bag of feedback here that this one squiggled its way toward the top. Of note: This isn’t the first time a Wegman’s product has done that! It had a significant hit of mint at the front—some, like our social media editor, Kelli, adored this, while others, such as Amanda, likened it to toothpaste—and not in a good way. Either way, it stretched nicely, had nice chip distribution, and wasn’t overly sweet. Color-wise, it was like…man-handled white chalk. But in a fun way!

Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.25/5

My pre-tasting notes read: “Seems fancy.” It was milky-white, firm enough to form a scoop shop-ish scoop, and it smelled nice. Genevieve noticed its "milkiness", but noted it tasted watery in addition to creamy. Kelli and Amanda clocked a gumminess that wasn’t entirely pleasant or unpleasant. All this to say, this was a satisfying option, if not exactly a fulfilling one?

Friendly’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.125/5

It was so wild how I opened this pint and, right as I began scooping, Frankenstein's monster said back to me: “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.” Tasting notes ranged from: “Dentist!! Dentist!” to “I’ve had this before…” to “Idk what this tastes like but it doesn’t taste like mint.” After our tasting was complete and I revealed this option—the most jarring, neon-adjacent green—to be Friendly’s, Helen, our guest taster/resident SEO genius, threw her head back and laughed in an "I knew it"-type way. Again, they ranked this one above-average!

McConnell’s Mint Chip, 3.17/5

Unequivocally the mintiest of the bunch. If! You! Want! A for-real-minty mint chocolate chip ice cream! You should! Pick! This! One! Comparisons were made to Ice Breakers commercials of yore. It looked like vanilla bean ice cream from the jump. It served as a nice palate cleanser for all that came after it! It also was a very helpful sample in determining criteria for this test—mint chocolate chip should not, in fact, be three-sticks-of-spicy-gum minty.

Tillamook Mint Chocolate Chip, 2.56/5

Another option in which the chunks shone (“These are the chunkiest chunks that have ever been chunked,” wrote Kelli), but the ice cream enveloping them didn’t as much. Tasters craved an ice cream with more mint and a firmer constitution. The whole experience, though aesthetically pleasing (we’ll call the color “white-ish”) and easy to scoop, felt muted.

Adirondack Creamery Whiteface Mint Chip, 2.56/5

Here we enter icy territory. Not, like, the aforementioned Ice Breaker ice. We just ended up with a ice- and chocolate shard-heavy pint. And with shard-shaped chocolate chips kinda-sorta scattered throughout, it wasn’t the creamy, balanced experience the group was hoping for. This sample points for prettiness, heft, and what might have been a more defined mint flavor on a different, less freezer-burned day.

Best Yet Mint Chocolate Chip, 2.4/5

I used up my two permitted dentist references three or four samples ago, so I can’t sit here talking about the toothpaste-iness of this guy for too long, but I will tell you: It felt like Best Yet R&D thought “No one else has gone full-steam-ahead at the toothpaste option. Let’s fill that space.” And they absolutely understood that assignment. Dental hygiene flavor? Check. Dental hygiene color? Check. Dental hygiene texture? It was “like whipped cream and ice cream met up,” per Alison, so nah.

Jeni’s Green Mint Chip, 2.25/5

From here on out, each ice cream was a cloudier color, whether it fell under the realm of “gray,” “green,” or “mossy cement gray-green.” (Again, color did not seem to factor into these rankings, but I'm noting them in case you do fall squarely into a "green chip" or "white chip" camp.) Jeni’s looked like the latter and…listen, we all sincerely love Jeni’s in our personal lives, but this simply did not hold up to the heat for even a minute, nor did it taste great in its quickly puddled form. That said, the chips were small, yummy, and evenly dispersed enough to make people happy, and the mint flavor—A more spearmint-forward energy I’m going to chalk up to the presence of honey in its ingredients list—was different enough from the rest that everyone took note.   

Edy’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 2.05/5

OK. So! This was nice but extremely sweet! How nice to have an option that woke up and said “I’m going to put every other sugary option to shame.” Sometimes, you really do just need to eat something you know is going to take you out later!! There were a lot of chocolate chips all up in this ice cream! Plus, if I had to describe the color, I’d call it “Lana Del Ray’s seafoam of choice,” so that’s cool in some circles!!!

Breyers Mint Chocolate Chip, 1.86/5

A well-intentioned ice cream with a prevailing sense of artificiality throughout. If you served this to me in an ice cream cake at a four-year-old’s birthday party on the world’s hottest day that would completely track for me!!

Turkey Hill Mint Chocolate Chip, 1.5/5

See above, but I would probably duck out of that party before dessert. That’s all!

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

I completely respect that you’d click into a story about ranking chocolate ice creams and expect to read about the merits of chocolate ice cream. That said, we are all aligned here, yeah? You love chocolate ice cream? You also feel that it is good? That it’s important? That it can make everything better? And, therefore, you would like to read some serious nonsense on which easily accessible brand of it is the best? Great! I have nothing more to say to introduce the subject and you’ve come to exactly the right place. 

Recently, the Serious Eats team pulled together 10 brands of chocolate ice cream you're likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of doing it!

Editor’s Note: We wanted to try Blue Bell, Ben & Jerry’s, Edy’s, Trader Joe’s, and Van Leeuwen’s chocolate options, but were unable to procure them the day of this particular taste test. But please! Slide into my DMs and tell me how wrong we are because Blue Bell, Ben & Jerry’s, Edy’s, Trader Joe’s, and Van Leeuwen’s chocolate ice creams are the best, I love it when people do that! <3

The Contenders

• Blue Bunny Soft Chocolate Frozen Dessert*
• Breyer’s Chocolate Ice Cream
• Friendly’s Rich & Creamy Classic Chocolate 
• Häagen Dazs Chocolate Ice Cream
• Halo Top Chocolate Light Ice Cream
• Jeni’s Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream
• Stop & Shop Chocolate Ice Cream, Churn Style
• Tillamook Chocolate Ice Cream
• Turkey Hill Dutch Chocolate, Premium Ice Cream
• Wegman’s Chocolate Premium French Ice Cream

*This is technically a “frozen dairy dessert” rather than an “ice cream” (which is how all of these other contenders are classified). Per the FDA definition, ice cream, along with a lot of other qualifiers, “contains not less than 10 percent milkfat,” whereas frozen dairy desserts don’t hit that threshold.

The Criteria

A good chocolate ice cream is—wait for it—chocolatey. I write this knowing full well you’re laughing! I also write this knowing you’ve likely not sampled 10 chocolate ice creams in rapid succession, evaluating each one diligently for its level of chocolate flavor. Not all supermarket chocolate ice creams even taste like chocolate, you monsters! And when they do, they often don’t taste like chocolate enough, or, in rare instances, they taste like chocolate too much, to the point of eating like chalky cocoa powder or protein powder dredges. 

The chocolate flavor should be rounded out with a significant punch of creaminess—you want to know you're eating a full-fat dairy product. We also prefer a chocolate ice cream that's been properly aerated (had air incorporated) so that it's dense yet soft, scoopable, and creamy, but not so much air (also called “overrun”) that it's foamy or reads as "light." 

Another factor that contributed heavily to this taste test was each ice cream’s chew factor. Clockable bounce, body, and chew all correlated with the less aerated options, and this staff enjoyed almost every instance of that. It’s objectively better to feel like you chewed your ice cream while you ate it than it is to feel like it could’ve been sipped. Like, on a scale from "poorly made diner milkshake" to Tootsie Roll, a proper chocolate ice cream should go down like luxurious saltwater taffy someone left out on a perfect 70-degree day for many, many hours. 

Of note: I was yanking a gigantic freezer door open and slamming it shut repeatedly over the course of a humid test kitchen day. Most of the ice creams in this test were delivered to the kitchen; a few were transported from home. Who knows how often they were frozen and unfrozen and re-frozen in transit even before then? All this to say, there was a variable mostly beyond our control that affected the iciness and meltiness of each sample. In a few cases, we ended up re-scooping and re-sampling where it felt like samples had been tarnished by the elements during their tumultuous time between their original containers and their sample bowls, and taste testers were able to ask for re-scoops as they felt necessary. I built that consideration into the sampling templates, asking people to separate temperature side effects out of their rankings as much as possible. As always, this is a very serious operation, and we operate seriously accordingly. 

OK! The ice creams.

The Rankings

Häagen Dazs Chocolate Ice Cream, 3.83/5

The Serious Eats staff’s affinity for Häagen-Dazs ice cream has been well documented on this website over the course of a couple of previous taste tests, including our strawberry ice cream taste test and our vanilla ice cream taste test. It’s not our fault they’ve managed to identify the exact-correct flavor:gumminess:aeration ratio across mass-produced-and-distributed pints! Our director of product Alison wrote: “This is a classic ice cream texture and it has a classic ice cream smell.” Kelli compared the experience to drinking a smooth glass of syrupy chocolate milk. And Daniel, who nearly immediately asked “Häagen-Dazs?” after taking a bite, much preferred this texture to aaaany of the other samples that came his way that day.

Breyer’s Chocolate Ice Cream, 3.67/5

Like absolute clockwork, voila: the second-place-via-nostalgia ranking! Each tester noted a sweet and middle-of-the-road chocolate flavor, as well as a creaminess that almost mattered more than the chocolate itself. I think these people just thrived in the mid-late ‘70s, ‘80s, and/or ‘90s? And/or they’d prefer to be…then than now? I’m not sure how else to explain how they manage to do this in every single taste test.

Wegman’s Chocolate Premium French Ice Cream, 3.33/5

I was so pleased that my pre-test notes on this pint were “luxury! I feel the gumminess in each scoop in the loveliest way!” and that everyone’s notes then pointed to this texture in a positive way. Daniel wrote that the Wegman’s scoop was “denser than most others in a pretty good way,” and Alison called the ice cream “silky-stretchy,” noting it tasted like “the chocolate layer in the Carvel ice cream cake.” That is such a good and visceral comparison, oh my god. I am so sad I didn’t think to make it first! Anyway, there’s something about an ice cream you have to chew just a little bit, you know?

Jeni’s Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream, 3.16/5

Visually arresting! Structurally significant! Packed with chocolate flavor, but maybe too much so? Kelli found the dark chocolate offering to be exactly her preferred level of chocolatiness saying she “could actually taste the chocolate! Joy!” Alison and Daniel identified the flavor as uber-concentrated, to the point that it gave them protein powder energy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! In fact, it was probably a good thing, given everyone began their respective sassy shticks about wanting more concentrated chocolate flavor from here on out.

Friendly’s Rich & Creamy Classic Chocolate, 3.16/5

Sweet, rich, and creamy, this ice cream was enjoyed by all! Kelli ranked it as her favorite one, and everyone else wrote lovely and mild things about it. My best guess is that deep in their wistful brains, they knew exactly what this was! They knew that it is best sucked down in a Fribble or piled on top of a fractured, vaguely stale sugar cone, enjoyed between the hours of 4 and 6 p.m. so that it ruins their dinners, They somehow just knew this stuff is not at its best  in a beige paper bowl in a New York City test kitchen at, like, 10:30 in the morning. 

Turkey Hill Dutch Chocolate, Premium Ice Cream, 3.16/5

Everything about Turkey Hill ice cream is easy. It’s easy to scoop, it’s easy to eat, it’s easy to smell, and it’s easy to digest. Not unrelated: It’s also so aerated. If you want to eat one hearty bowl of substantive, soothing chocolate ice cream and have a cathartic cry, this is not for you. If you want to eat a quart of cloud-like chocolate pudding and then still feel your unresolved feelings, this is exactly for you!

Tillamook Chocolate Ice Cream, 3.1/5

In yet another completely spot-on reference I am so upset I didn’t make, Kelli’s notes from this tasting read: “This reminds me of the chocolate ice cream that they used to give us in grade school from those little round cardboard containers and a little wooden tongue depressor instead of a spoon.” Ugh!!!! It’s too true!!! That’s exactly what it smelled and tasted and felt like!!! It was consistently smooth, decently foamy, and tasted very gentle.

Stop & Shop Chocolate Ice Cream, Churn Style, 3/5

The only chocolate ice cream of the bunch to elicit the word “maltiness” in tasting notes! “At this serving temp, it's like eating semifreddo chocolate mousse…which isn't the worst,” Daniel said. The others noted the sweetness rather than chocolatey-ness of this offering, and craved more heft and chew in each bite.

Blue Bunny Soft Chocolate Frozen Dessert, 2.75/5

Do you always sit down to eat your ice cream and think: “Ugh, I’d rather have pudding?” Firstly, that’s wild! Secondly, a perfect option somehow exists for you, you gorgeous and total weirdo, within this incredibly vast market. Enjoy your freezer pudding! (Again, to be clear, this option is technically classified as “frozen dairy dessert,” not as “ice cream.”)

Halo Top Chocolate Light Ice Cream, 2.16/5

Listen. It’s like putting Lactaid brand cottage cheese in the official cottage cheese taste test. It’s not exactly nice or fair, but it has to be done. You know it doesn’t quite belong here, not among this group. You don’t exactly feel good about this. You don’t exactly sleep well at night. You know very well you’ve robbed everyone of the full-fat experience you promised them when you pretty much coerced them into participating in a vaguely professional ice cream-eating contest. But you put the Halo Top in your cart, telling yourself “they’ll forgive me eventually.” And you keep it moving. 

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

I’ve been writing on the internet professionally for many, many years now. Over that period of time, I’ve come to realize it’s smartest to provide readers (all of whom are likely to bounce quickly–yes, even you) with the necessary context for understanding eeeverything they’re about to read as quickly as possible in the introduction of the piece if you want a chance of them sticking around. So, if you’re still reading, here’s the context required for fully internalizing this one:

I am a Jew from New Jersey who recently moderated a cream cheese taste test. All of the cream cheese taste-testers live in or around New York City. There were a lot of correct opinions voiced in the room that day. Mine, which you’ll read woven throughout the below entries, is the most correct one.

Anyway! It took so long to deliberate over what makes a good cream cheese that we actually had to reschedule this taste test thrice. After said weeks of arguing that, no, it did not make sense to conduct three separate taste tests to determine separately which brick, spread, and whipped cream cheeses are the best, I got all appropriate parties in a room one day. They all had access to one or two plain bagels, as well as a curated selection of three categories of cream cheese. All this to say: The SE team has pulled together eight brands of cream cheese you're likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we viscerally loved every minute of it!

Before you read on, it’s important to note: We separated these cheeses into three subcategories because they are very much are different products! Blocks (or bricks!) of cream cheese have little moisture or air mixed in. Spreads have some air whipped in! Whipped cream cheeses are the lightest and airiest offering, with the most air (and stabilizers) whipped in of all. This difference becomes apparent (1) the second you lay eyes on them side-by-side, and (2) when you subsequently attempt to transfer each to its second location. It physically takes more effort to grab a hunk of freshly room-temp cream cheese from a block than it does to remove the same amount from a spread. It doesn't take any energy to move a serving of whipped cream cheese spread anywhere.

More helpfully, perhaps, is that you can see these differences illustrated across the weight and caloric content variations within the same brand. Philadelphia’s Whipped Original, for example, says its serving size of 2 tablespoons comes in around 22 grams (as well as with 50 calories, 1 gram of protein, and 4.5 grams of fat per serving). Its spread counterpart? Thirty-one grams = 2 tablespoons of product, 80 calories, 2 grams of protein, and 7 grams of fat per serving. Finally, the Philadelphia brick yields 28 grams per ounce and 100 calories, 2 grams of protein, and 10 grams of fat per serving. This light (whipped), medium (spread), and most robust (block) breakdown rings true for each brand with multiple offerings across this taste test.

OK. Time to dance.

The Contenders

Blocks

• Organic Valley
• Philadelphia
• Tillamook

Spreads

• 365 Cream Cheese Spread
• Nancy’s Probiotic Cream Cheese Spread
• Organic Valley Cream Cheese Spread
• Philadelphia Original Cream Cheese Spread

Whips

• 365 Whipped Cream Cheese
• Philadelphia Whipped Original
• Temp Tee

The Criteria

A good cream cheese, no matter what form it comes in, is tangy. Not so tangy that you’ll wonder how sour cream ended up on your bagel (god forbid), but tangy enough that you’ll know you made a better choice than putting butter on your bagel (god forbid). A restrained tang. There should also be enough salt and creaminess to lend a certain heft to each bite. You want to immediately know: “What I’m eating right now? This could be the foundation of a great cheesecake one day.” Again, regardless of form, your cream cheese should spread easily. Don’t look at me like that. No, not all cream cheeses (not even all cream cheese spreads!) spread seamlessly. There are a lot of stabilizers out here in these parts!! 

The Rankings

BRICKS

Philadelphia Cream Cheese, 4.3/5

Well, well, well. Fancy meeting you here, etc., etc. This brick had a “good lactic tang in a mild milky base," Daniel wrote. "It was thick, creamy, smooth, and spreadable,” he added. It was “creamy with just a hint of sweetness,” Kelli notes. Our stop-in taste-tester du jour/director of product Allison Mango echoed Daniel and Kelli’s thoughts: “It’s got a little tang at the end. I really liked the taste; it’s nice and creamy with a little saltiness.” At the conclusion of the test, everyone wanted to know if they’d picked the Philadelphia brick, and they all had. It’s just kinda nice when I don’t have to pretend like I’m shocked about a taste test winner, ya know?

Organic Valley Cream Cheese, 3.3/5

An interesting silver medal winner! Opinions were split here. The flavor was lovely. “Very creamy with the right amount of sour and salt—reminds me of cottage cheese flavor,” our photographer Jordan wrote, but the texture raised flags from the group. It was distinctly stabilized with gums and spread more like all the “spread” offerings than any of the other blocks. See: quickly and slippery. Either way, it Tasted Like Cream Cheese.

Tillamook Cream Cheese, 3.13/5

A deliciously sweet offering, Tillamook cream cheese was enjoyed by all…with the caveat that they’d prefer it on a lox-laden bagel to compensate for a lack of salt. Daniel called what it did have a mere “background salt,” and that lack of saltiness is what ultimately brought this one down to third place.. So creamy! So sweet! Spread very nicely! Just…so little salt!

SPREADS

Philadelphia Original Cream Cheese Spread, 4/5

Hello again, you! You tangy, spreadable, classically cream cheesy you! It just felt correct on a bagel, is all!

365 Cream Cheese Spread, 3.33/5

Another dark horse contender! 365 offerings tend to…tank…in our taste tests, so I did quadruple-check this math. But no, the testers enjoyed this as a straightforward option. It checked the appropriate saltiness and tanginess boxes as well as the creaminess one, but every time I see a singular word called out in every tester’s comments, I am legally required to point it out. In this case? “Smooth.” Jordan called it “super smooth,” Allison called it “buttery smooth,” Kelli called it “smooooth,” and Daniel, finally, and true-to-form, called it “almost too smooth.” Idk, guys. If you prefer a grittier (?) cream cheese, don’t buy this one? I guess?

Nancy’s Probiotic Cream Cheese Spread, 3.25/5

In Nancy’s defense, she is extremely upfront about the inclusion of culture in her cream cheese. In my coworkers’ defense, they had no idea what they were eating. These comments were riddled with mentions of what an overly sour product it was. Still, the softness and smoothness of the product came through in every bite. They liked it! They were just confused for a sec!

Organic Valley Cream Cheese Spread, 2.66/5

Nearly as sour as Nancy’s and with far fewer cultures, I fear.

WHIPS

Temp Tee, 3.88/5

A sign the people I work with like a thing? They use as few words as humanly possible to describe it. Here are the entries for Temp Tee:

“Good tang.” -Daniel
“Air-ier, fluffier! Like whipped cream!” -Allison
“Amazing flavor!” -Jordan
“Floofy.” -Kelli

All of these opinions are correct.

365 Whipped Cream Cheese, 3.88/5

The most visually frosting-like of the whole bunch. In fact, it looked so much like frosting it gave a few people pause. But it ultimately tasted light and airy without tipping into over-aeration, and it was not nearly as sweet as some feared it might be.

Philadelphia Whipped Original, 2.86/5

I’m not sure how to end the bit here. Is it, like, “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” Or more of an emphatic: “You?? Here?? Now??” On the positive side, it was very smooth and aesthetically very pleasing. Idk. It was just wetter and still, somehow, also foamier than the other two whipped cream cheeses.

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted completely anonymously and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.

The Serious Eats reader, in my experience, is a lot of things. She’s passionate! She’s nuanced! She’s intense about the fact that peanut butter should always be crunchy! (I learned this about her after publishing a creamy peanut butter taste test recently.) I respect that, but I’m also a little scared of her. I'm also a little scared of all the Serious Eats readers who passionately disagree with her and, with the publication of this chunky peanut butter taste test, now have a whole new reason to send angry emails.

In all seriousness, crunchy peanut butter is divisive, as are most staples that people voluntarily carry from childhood pantries into adult ones. Feelings run strong, but we're professionals here at Serious Eats and are able to check our own in the name of taste-test objectivity.

So, the SE team has pulled together eight brands of crunchy peanut butters you're likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of it!

The Contenders

• JIF Peanut Butter, Extra Crunchy
• Nature’s Promise Peanut Butter Crunchy Organic
• Once Again Crunchy Peanut Butter
• Skippy Super Chunk Peanut Butter 
• Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter
• Teddie All Natural Peanut Butter, Super Chunky
• Urban Meadow Crunchy Peanut Butter
• WOODSTOCK Organic Crunchy Peanut Butter

The Criteria

A good crunchy peanut butter boasts minimal oiliness (after mixing in any oil that separated during storage) and significant savoriness. Our top contenders skewed much saltier than they did sweet; they also had chunks that, despite varying sizes, were often described as “crispy.” Contrastingly, our less-loved jars had mushier or even “raw”-tasting nuts.

The jars we procured were all over the map texture-wise. About half could be described as thin and slippery, almost like eating a broken vinaigrette. The other half was like studded nut-butter velvet (thick! consistent!), not a hint of oil slick to be found. The Serious Eats team was less bothered by the distinct presence of artificiality in this test than they were in the creamy peanut butter version. In fact, a little stabilization and emulsification went a long, pleasant way—a sign that when PB goes crunchy, our tastes go junky?

Relatedly, those same winning jars hit our testers with a nice lil' dose of nostalgia. If a chunky peanut butter is doing its job, per our findings, you should be able to open it and know you’re in for a good time just by smelling the stuff. Like, just the action of smelling it should hit like listening to Coolio (or TLC, or Gloria Estefan, or…whatever was playing in your house after school). 

As with the creamy PB taste test, we avoided “spreads” (it's a different product with fewer nuts and more stabilizers, so please, please stop emailing me to ask why Justin’s has not made an appearance in these tests—we will do another test specifically for spreads!) Either way, I stirred each peanut butter for 20 seconds a pop before plopping each sample into a bowl and serving it to the team with no accompaniments.

The Rankings

Urban Meadow Crunchy Peanut Butter, 3.8/5

You (famously, I think) shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but there's nothing wrong with judging a peanut butter by what you’re greeted with when you pull off the lid. Per my pre-testing notes, this Key Foods brand (!) was “gorgeous! There’s no separation and there are even chunks riddled throughout.” From there, the comments were fascinating, ranging from: “This reminds me of soy sauce? Like a charred barbecue flavor? Would this be good for peanut sauce?” to “Very tasty! I would definitely eat this again happily.” The chunks were small, but they were consistently small, and they ate crisp-ily in each bite. Everyone was happy with this PB's versatility, or, at the very least, not mad about having to eat a lot of this stuff. And in this house, we stan a begrudging near-consensus.

JIF Peanut Butter, Extra Crunchy, 3.7/5

HEheheheheheeeee! Megan: “This has got to be Skippy or Jif or some such.” Kelli: “Creamy and nostalgic, this has to be a common brand like Jif. This is clearly a super contrived texture, meant to make me happy, and it does.” Then, ok, fine, Daniel: “This is not my preferred style of PB, but as far as processed ones go, this one is pleasant.” Genevieve: “This is very thick with visible chunks of peanut. Slightly sticky/gummy. Good crunch when eating.” Me, in those same keeper-of-the-key pre-test notes: “Completely unnatural matte asteroid of joy.”

Teddie All Natural Peanut Butter, Super Chunky, 3.7/5

I was eager to see where this guy would land, given Teddie’s middling ranking  in the creamy peanut butter taste test (despite being loved by the team in their personal lives). It fared much better here. Firstly, this stuff was pretty. It’s the color of Three Musketeers filling—a viscerally good and important color. Secondly, it was correctly salty and savory with very consistent chunking. “Totally enjoyable. Very nicely chunked,” Daniel wrote. Genevieve pointed to hints of wasabi (!?) while Kelli noted how “real” it tasted. A happy—but not nostalgic!—confluence of peanut butter things.

Skippy Super Chunk Peanut Butter, 3/5

You’ll notice the drop of .7 points here. That may seem surprising given that this option checked the oh-god-I-miss-the-’90s box and was also pleasantly roasty and chunky, but, my friends, these things matter less if it feels like you’re masticating through sweet glue. This is a perfect option for a snacky, dehydrated human: One bite and you're guaranteed a touch of sweet and a pop of salt followed by half your daily recommended H2O intake just to try to wash it down!

WOODSTOCK Organic Crunchy Peanut Butter, 2.85/5

In happy news, this oily offering stirred back together very easily. No part of it tasted artificial; in fact, it toed the line between naturally smooth and artificially smooth very nicely. Megan described the experience of eating this peanut butter as “surprising,” as she didn’t love the appearance, but was taken aback by the level of “nice toasted-ness.” Daniel appreciated the sweetness, noting it wasn’t overly so. The less-happy news was that that initial oiliness made an appearance in just about every subsequent bite, and that the sample re-puddled quite quickly.

Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter, 2.49/5

A nice peanut butter that tasted as though it’d been sitting on a shelf for more than a minute. Though we’ll never know if it once tasted fresh and became “stale and dusty” or if it simply was that way upon bottling, the stale peanut taste was undeniable for each and every tester. That said, most remarked on the overall flavor being a good combination of salt vs. sweet.

Once Again Crunchy Peanut Butter, 2.15/5

The award for Singular Comment That Made Me LOL This Time goes to: “This needs salt and something else–maybe peanuts??” by Megan O. Steintrager. (Daniel echoed this sentiment, writing “I think the peanut flavor might be fine, if only salt was there to lift it up.”) I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that a few people felt the wistfulness that comes along with a good crunchy peanut butter, but I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention they mentioned it in a “Play-Doh” and “gummy lipstick” capacity.

Nature’s Promise Peanut Butter Crunchy Organic, 1.8/5

Uh oh!

Our Tasting Methodology

All taste tests are conducted completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated, results are calculated, and rankings are made to reveal the most impartial results possible. Then we write a bunch of silly interpretive nonsense about it that may or may not explain what anyone was thinking.

I look back now and I laugh: How naive I was! To think we could publish an unsalted butter taste test and just walk away from it assuming you would be happy. I remember the day I hit ‘publish’ and the relief I felt as I crossed another item off my to-do list. But that was quickly followed by annoyed Instagram comments, and then the exasperated emails rolled in. You…you prefer salted butter. Because our preference is almost always to cook with unsalted butter, we forgot that eating it is much more pleasurable when there's salt involved.

Here's the good news: I've now made everyone eat a disgusting amount of salted butter. 

On a recent test kitchen day, the SE team pulled together 13 brands of salted butter that you're likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we had a delicious blast doing it. I hope you enjoy our findings! (Said without a hint of saltiness, I promise.)

The Contenders

• Amish Country Butter, Salted, Roll
• Breakstone's All Natural Salted Butter
• Cabot Salted Butter Quarters
• Challenge Butter, Salted
• Finlandia Imported Butter, Perfectly Salted
• Grassland Non-GMO, Salted Sweet Cream Butter
• Kerrygold Butter, Pure Irish
• Land O’Lakes Butter, Salted
• Nature’s Promise Organic Sweet Cream Butter Salted Sticks
• Plugrà Premium European Style Salted Butter
• Truly Grass Fed Natural Creamy Irish Butter, Salted
• Urban Meadows Salted Butter 
• Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter With Sea Salt

The Criteria

A good salted butter is—wait for it—salty. That saltiness shouldn’t overwhelm the butter's dairy sweetness (with or without a cultured tang), but it should highlight it in pleasantly seasoned bursts.

To assess the butters, testers evaluated each in randomized order and without knowing which brands were which. They scored the butters on specific criteria like flavor, aroma, and texture, as well as overall preference.

Butters were allowed to sit at room temperature for one hour before tasting to take the chill off and make spreading on bread possible. We didn’t want the color of the butter to affect anyone’s opinion, so we flipped all the buttered bread upside down and conducted the tasting without peeking at the product underneath. As always, this is important work that I took very seriously, annoying no one at all during the process.

The Big Picture

Similarly to the unsalted butter taste test, we concluded that…we like almost all salted butter! 

While the below results are ranked in order of score, all the samples' average scores fell within a narrow 1.5-point range, which means there was not a dramatic difference from one to the next (this was also true in our unsalted butter taste test). Our top-ranking selections were packed with positive notes from testers, but everything toward the “bottom” got, at most, few gently, minimally critical notes.

One interesting difference from our unsalted butter taste test was that, with the noteworthy exception of the highest-scored butter, all our other top selections overwhelmingly had at least 82% butterfat, making them all fall under the umbrella of “European-style butter.” This indicates that the presence of salt, which is a "flavor enhancer," makes other qualities of the butter more pronounced—the muted flavors of unsalted butter apparently made it more difficult to suss out qualities like fat percentage that, in theory, might correlate with perceptions of quality. With salt added, that was less the case.

As for aroma, we found it to be a less preference-defining quality across these samples than we did with the unsalted butters, but mild nature smells (grass, mushrooms, cream) were received well by tasters. 

It’s worth noting we’d hoped to include Vital Farms (our unsalted winner!), Kate’s, Isigny Ste Mère Beurre D'Isigny, Les Prés Salés, Hotel Bar, and Organic Valley butters, but could not find them across four supermarkets. 

TL;DR: Salted butter—it’s good! Wild out in a salted butter aisle near you!

The Rankings

Cabot Salted Butter Quarters, 3.9/5

80.6% butterfat
The way I triple-checked to make sure this was the butter everyone was raving about!! “Grassy and fresh,” Kelli wrote: “This tastes like exactly what you want first thing in the morning.” It reminded Genevieve “of a really nice butter you get at a French restaurant, bread basket and all.” Jordan “loved everything about this butter.” No one explicitly made note of the salt content of this butter, so I’m going to assume it was neither too salty nor too not-salty, but instead quietly just right (very much a Goldilocks moment as far as salted butters go).

Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter with Sea Salt, 3.87/5

82% butterfat
And just like that, saltiness entered the equation! Not only did most everyone call out an ideal salt-to-sweet ratio, but they also enjoyed the clean, cultured flavor of this butter. It “might be the only one I actually want to eat consistently out of the pack,” per Genevieve.

Amish Country Butter, Salted, Roll, 3.33/5

84-85% butterfat
There’s a lot to love about anything edible that makes its way to you in the form and size of a sunshine-y yellow cylindrical brick. Of course, my coworkers did not know this was said brick while eating it, but this Amish offering yielded the most interesting tasting notes. Daniel called it “slightly barnyardy,” (affectionately, I think?), while Genevieve said it tasted “halfway to garlic bread.” Kelli called it floral, noting it was “the most complex flavor [she] experienced during this test,” and Jordan tasted lemon in each bite. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Megan’s fantastically scathing “this tastes like salty fridge” note, but others’ rankings were so high it didn’t nudge this placement down.

Plugrà Premium European Style Salted Butter, 3.32/5

82% butterfat
Not only did salt hit hard in this sample, but the butter tasted creamy and nutty to most testers, some of whom said they felt nostalgic eating it.

Nature’s Promise Organic Sweet Cream Butter Salted Sticks, 3.22/5

82% butterfat
Tasters noted that this butter had salt woven through it in seeming ribbons, rather than spread evenly throughout. It was milky! It was creamy! It was fancy-feeling! It was a really nice option!

Kerrygold Butter, Pure Irish, 3.21/5

82% butterfat
All testers pointed to a pleasant fatiness present in their beloved Kerrygold (really—this team talks organically about their fondness for Kerrygold a lot). Mentions of fresh movie theater popcorn, rich olive oil, and unskimmed cream, etc. It's a lovely option with a rich texture.

Truly Grass Fed Natural Creamy Irish Butter, Salted, 3.21/5

82% butterfat
“Nice and salty!” Genevieve wrote. In fact, this butter saw the most instances of “salty!” written verbatim throughout testing notes. Do you like salt? Do you like butter? You will like this salty butter!

Finlandia Imported Butter, Perfectly Salted, 3.15/5

82-83% butterfat
One of the very few butters with a smell described by those who noticed it as distinctly “buttery.” There are worse things to be called than buttery, if you're a block of butter.

Breakstone's All Natural Salted Butter, 3.15/5

“At least 80% butterfat”
Megan was the first one to describe this butter as “quite salty,” while Daniel took it to: “maybe too salty!” Still, it tasted neutral and not not as rich as some of the other butters in this tasting, likely due to it being on the lower end of the butterfat spectrum.

Land O’Lakes Butter, Salted, 3/5

Not much to say here except it's a totally neutral option for those looking to eat a lot of salty butter but not feel like they are digesting a ton of salty butter; once again, lower butterfat is probably to thank for this being the overarching description.

Challenge Butter, Salted, 3/5

80% butterfat
Many enjoyed this butter's smoothness. Kelli mentioned she would be hesitant to add more salt if she were cooking with this, though no one else pointed to the salt level as too much.

Grassland Non-GMO, Salted Sweet Cream Butter, 2.9/5

80% butterfat
Very mild and pleasant. Softened quickly, spread easily. Sunk into my hands like molten lava cake when I attempted to put it back in the fridge around four-and-a-half hours at room temp. That’s OK! I love for colleagues to see my laptop and think: “Ew!”

Urban Meadows Salted Butter, 2.8/5

80% butterfat
Despite its 80% butterfat, three tasters described this as a “clearly fatty” butter. Urban Meadows also came through sweeter than it did salty to many. That’s also OK! I love for my colleagues to think: “Did she mix up the taste tests? On purpose??” I ate six baguette bites coated in this stuff just to feel something.

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.