I love gimmicks. Anyone can tell you I am down for any theme restaurant, molecular gastronomy experience, or any sort of historic reenactment. I AM DOWN. Boyfriend and I were leaving Harvard's museum of Natural History when we stumbled across Churned2, a liquid nitrogen ice cream shop housed in a storage container.
As stated on their website they wanted to combine a food truck and a brick and mortar store to attain the best part of both worlds: the community generated around a brick and mortar store and the mobility offered by a "food truck" without consuming the amount of fossil fuels that food trucks require for day to day operations.
Their decor is cute and the staff was young and friendly. The two flavors they offered that particular day were Cinnamon Crunch and White Chocolate. From what I saw, the Cinnamon Crunch flavor was a milk/cream flavored ice cream with Cap'n Crunch Cereal sprinkled on top and the white chocolate flavor was just a homogenous cream ice cream. No white chocolate chunks, veins, or white chocolate drizzled on top. Just a sweet ice cream, but I'll get to that later.
Here you can see a little bit of the process where they use the liquid nitrogen to churn the ice cream base. The churn staff was attentive in wearing protective eyewear and gloves while mixing the whole thing. Why would you want to use liquid nitrogen to make ice cream? Besides the fact that it looks cool, it also supposedly cools the ice cream base so fast large ice crystals don't have a chance to form, giving you a creamy, smooth ice cream 100% of the time.
Milk, sugar, science, and magic!
After a quick churn, you can see her scooping out the now-solidified ice cream and placing it into biodegradable bowls.
This is the final product, looking good right? Boyfriend and I decided to get the regular size and split it for $7.00.
The texture was fine. It was nice and creamy and certainly a step up from cheap bargain brand ice creams that go on sale at the grocery store week after week...but the flavor was disappointing. It just tasted like ice cream base. Churned, frozen, sweetened milk. Also, as mentioned before, the white chocolate ice cream was completely homogenous. They didn't add any flavor texture or variety with white chocolate shavings or chunks to the mix, so the ice cream altogether was pretty boring, both in texture and in taste.
Overall, we found the ice cream to be nothing special. I was pretty vocal about how disappointed I was after consumption and even boyfriend (who is usually very ambivalent when it comes to these things) chimed in. If we want to satisfy our white chocolate craving we'll just head to Burdick's for the white hot chocolate instead.
Price: $$ of $$$$$
Repeatability: No
Kid Friendly: Yes! Ice cream basically means children.
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