Archer Farms Tiramisu Gelato

You're going to want to try this.

It's a no-brainer. I was skeptical at first, but this is tied for the best-tasting tiramisu I've ever had. And it's not even really tiramisu. It's gelato.

The first time I ever had tiramisu was in Los Angeles, about eight years ago. I was with a couple of friends, and one of them brought along this crazy French photographer guy I had never met before. He discovered that one other person in our group and I had both never tried real tiramisu, so he took us to this expensive Italian restaurant on Melrose. I insisted that I didn't want any, but he bought all of us dishes of the dessert anyway. It was like $10 for three small bites. It was ridiculous. But so good, it was almost worth the price tag.

Since then, I've tried it at a couple of less-swanky restaurants, and it has been sub-par every time. Until now.

As I mentioned before, the flavor of this gelato is excellent. The top layer tastes like the most rich coffee...it's almost chocolatey. And the ice cream itself is buttery, creamy, sweet and vanilla-ish. Delicious.

There are a few swirls of the dark coffee goodness throughout the gelato, too. It's mixed-in at a pretty good ratio. There's a lot more of the plain golden ice cream, but the dark stuff is so rich, you don't need a lot of it.

The one weakness of this amazing dessert is a slight lack of texture. The creaminess of the ice cream is great, and the softness of the top layer is good...but real tiramisu is made with cookies. Ladyfingers.

If they had added ladyfinger cookies, or even just cookie bits soaked in coffee throughout the ice cream, they could have created the ultimate dessert. Also, there's carrageenan in it, which is bad for you. But it's so low on the ingredients list that we all could have overlooked that.

But seriously, if version 2.0 has little ladyfinger cookie bits all through it, you can bet I'll have heaps of this stuff stocked in my freezer all the time. Even as it stands, this is one killer gelato.

I give the tiramisu gelato 9 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Dulce de Leche Gelato

In Spanish, "dulce de leche" means "sweet of milk." It's basically caramel. It's good.

This gelato is pretty tasty, too, if you like caramel. Fortunately, I do, and my wife does as well.

But I wasn't quite as enthralled with this product as I was with my delicious Crème Cake & Berry Swirl Gelato. I think it was the bits of sponge cake in the latter that really pushed it over the top for me.

The caramel in this product is very good, the gelato itself is good—on par with all the other vanilla-based gelato I've had from Archer Farms. The mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids are really good...wait...what did I just say? Sometimes it's better to remain ignorant and not even read the ingredients list, especially if you're trying to treat yourself to something special. What? No triglycerides of fatty acids? Cheap jerks.

But seriously, in comparison with the Cake & Berry nonsense, this flavor is just a little boring to me. I feel like I have tasted sweet Heaven, and I don't wanna go back to Earth.

But under any other circumstances, this review would have made this product sound like a raving success. It is very good. My wife claims to like it just as much and maybe better than the Cake & Berry flavor. To say it's better than the Cake & Berry is preposterous to me. But it is a close second...I'll give her that.

I give this product 8 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Crème Cake & Berry Swirl Gelato

It's hot again here in Philadelphia. And that means it's time for a barrage of reviews on frozen treats from my local Target's freezer.

Compared to the other Archer Farms gelato flavor that I checked out on this blog, this one's definitely a bit tastier. It's got oval-shaped bits of sponge cake all through it, which add a welcome element of complexity to the product's texture. They taste pretty good, too. They're lightly sweet and bready. The gelato's also sweetened with various fruit juices, as well as sugar, so it's got some quality ingredients. It's not just a tub of cheap high fructose corn syrup.

The fruit gel swirled throughout the product tastes vaguely of berry, although considering there's plenty of actual fruit juice in the product, the reddish jelly part of it doesn't necessarily taste that way. I think it might be a simple matter of blending too many different berry juices together, so that it doesn't taste like any one fruit in particular. But that's not a dealbreaker—not by any means.

This product also lacks the nasty aftertaste present in the Cherry Amaretto version, so that's another plus. The vanilla part of the product is creamy and rich, and its quality falls juuust shy of gelatos I've had from actual gelato parlors—places where one tiny dish of ice cream costs as much as this entire tub.

So all in all, this is a big thumbs up. I could hardly keep myself from eating the whole container in one sitting.

I give this product 9 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Genoa Salami Pizza with Spicy Peppers

Man, I just love a good Italian sub. All of those spiced meats, oregano, cheese, and peppers can really hit the spot sometimes.

Now imagine taking some of the best ingredients in an Italian sub and throwing them on a thin, crispy pizza crust and baking them to perfection in your oven. That's basically what we have here.

I've never tasted a meat that blended so perfectly with banana peppers as this Genoa salami did. The cover of this product mentions both "banana peppers" and "pepperoncinis," but I was pretty sure they were the same thing. You know, you always get them at Subway. Most locations label them as banana peppers, but regionally, they're also known as pepperoncinis. I certainly didn't see two types of peppers on top of this pizza, but enough with semantics. This pizza tasted great.

It also has whole milk mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and crushed red pepper already on it. Altogether, the two shining stars of this product are the pepperoncinis and the salami. You could throw a bit of those two ingredients on plain white toast and it would taste pretty good, in my opinion. The cheese and tomato sauce are present, and they certainly don't hurt the flavor, but they don't do a whole lot for it, either. Mozzarella is generally a mild cheese, and maybe AF's food gurus knew what they were doing when they made sure it played second fiddle to the meat and peppers, but I'd be very interested in finding out what this product would taste like with a bolder cheese.

The crust seemed crispier and less chewy than many other AF pizzas. I don't know if that was solely because we cooked it a tad longer or whether the crust is actually made differently in this pizza. Either way, it was pretty close to "New York-style" and it worked well with the toppings.

My wife and I both agree, this is tied for the best Archer Farms brand pizza we've had so far. We'll put it up there with the Eggplant Parm.

I give this pizza 8 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Amaretto Cherry Gelato

In recent weeks, we've taken a look at crème brûlée and Bolognese pizza. Today, we're taking a look at another European favorite, imported all the way from Italy, according to the label.

It's gelato. Italian ice cream. Not to be confused with Italian ice, or Italian water ice. It's very similar to traditional ice cream, except it's made with skim milk instead of cream. But make no mistake, this isn't a low-calorie/low-fat option. They add plenty of butter and sugar to make up for the nonfat milk. It might have slightly less fat overall, but you can't really call it "light." It gives the ice cream a different texture. It's a bit more rich usually, and it's significantly more dense.

This is a tasty flavor. I love me some amaretto. It has plenty of cherry tang, and there's also a vanilla-esque taste to it. The majority of the product is a white/pink creamy substance with ribbons of deeper red, sticky-sweet syrup running through it.

Compared to other gelato's that I've tried, this one differs in a couple ways. I don't recall ever having a gelato with a "ribbon" of anything in it before. In my experience, that's more like something you'd find in a Ben & Jerry's flavor than in actual gelato. Portions of the product seemed to have crystallized mini-flakes of ice, particularly the syrupy ribbon. So there were minor instances of "crunchiness" interrupting the pure creaminess. Not enough that the experience was ruined, but enough to make me take notice.

Also, my wife and I agree that the candied cherries in this product were NASTY. They were beyond sour. And I love maraschino cherries. But these were...I don't know...something else. Virtually inedible. Thankfully, there were only 5 or 6 of them in the whole tub.

This product also left a bit of a weird aftertaste—similar to that of a cherry-flavored medicine. Not particularly pleasant, but the pleasure of actually eating the stuff outweighs the strangeness of the lingering flavor in my opinion. All things considered, this is a flavor worth checking out, especially if you're a cherry-ophile.

I give this gelato 7 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Crème Brûlée

Yes, they sell fine French desserts at Target, including crème brûlée. Now that's one instance where I hope you mentally pronounced Target as "Tar-zhay." So freakin' fancy. But did they do it well? The answer is yes. Well enough for this unsophisticated foodie-hack, anyway.

I've had crème brûlée at a couple of weddings, some Las Vegas buffets, from Trader Joe's, and at a nice little family-run French restaurant. Overall, the first wedding I had it at was the best one. But flavor-wise, this one might be tied for second. It's DELICIOUS.

However, it utterly failed the sugar-shell crackable top test. You actually have to put the sugar on yourself, stick the dessert in the broiler for a few minutes and hope that the sugar melts evenly across the top of the crème. 

But it didn't. There were just big granules of pseudo-melted sugar all clustered across the top of the custard. Maybe if my wife and I had been more meticulous with our sugar-distribution, it would have turned out better, but this is why it's best to have some expert chef do it for you. We were in this sugar-craving frenzy and we didn't have our wits about us, much to the shame of our poor dessert. And then, after broiling the crème brûlée, you're supposed to allow it to sit on the counter and cool—and then you're supposed to put it back in the fridge! Who has that kind of willpower!?

But honestly, I don't really care about the sugar-shell crackable top thing. As long as it tastes good. And IT DID. This is honestly the best thing I have ever tasted from Target. The custard and the sugar were amazing together.

It's $6 for two little dishes of the delectable dessert. But they're worth it. Plus, it comes with two ceramic ramekins that you can keep! My wife thinks she'll use them to make her own flan someday (we'll see if that actually happens, though). And if not, they'll come in handy as dipping bowls for salsa or sauce of some kind.

If they weren't so much work, and if the top had come out a tad better, this might have been our first perfect 10 star score.

I give this crème brûlée 9 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Bolognese Pizza

If I had to guess what this pizza was all about just based on its name, I would of course assume that it had bologna as a topping. Which, of course, would be wrong. It does, however, have a "beef Bolognese sauce." Yay! Meat, right?

Well, sort of. It's more like a "meat-flavored" sauce than a topping that contains actual chunks of beef. Don't expect a meat-lovers pizza here and you might not be too disappointed. Apparently a Bolognese sauce is a traditional pasta sauce originating from Bologna, Italy, and it's only supposed to contain very finely-chopped or minced meat—not meat chunks. If I had educated myself before purchasing, I might not have felt so let-down.

But on a more positive note, the mozzarella and fontina cheeses taste great. If you've had any other AF pizzas, you know more or less what to expect from the crust. This one boasts that it has a "hand-stretched crust," but then again, so do the Eggplant Parm Pizza and the Spinach and Goat Cheese Pizza. But to me, the crusts all taste pretty much the same as the Mediterranean Pizza, which supposedly does not have said "hand-stretched crust."

Overall, the typical AF crust, the semi-meaty tomato sauce, and the two unique cheese flavors come together to make a fairly snacktastic pizza. It doesn't have a heavy, overwhelming flavor at all. Think of the delicate flavor of a nice, fresh mozzarella cheese and add to it a mild meat-flavored pasta sauce, and you can pretty well imagine what this pizza tastes like.

This pizza earns 7 out of 10 stars.

Archer Farms Mediterranean Arugula & Tomato Wood-Fired Pizza

The mozzarella on this pizza was quite possibly the blandest cheese I've ever eaten. The "Italian tomato sauce" wasn't flavorful, either. The crust had a nice texture for a frozen pizza and tasted like it could have actually been "wood-fired" as the packaging claims, although, it too, lacked flavor overall.

The only part of this pizza that my wife and I definitely tasted was the arugula. And arugula is bitter. It can add some depth to the flavors of certain pizzas, but in my opinion, you don't want it to be the dominant flavor.

This pizza's a decent size. Enough to cut 8 good slices from it. And I'm quite certain I've had very tasty frozen pizzas from Target before, but this was among the worst. I love Mediterranean dishes, and I'm pretty adventurous when it comes to trying foreign foods and experiencing unusual flavors. But I've simply had too many good Mediterranean-type foods to completely fall in love with this one. It looks like an artisan pizza, and it certainly didn't smell bad coming out of the oven, it's just that it needs more kick, more taste, and a bit more flair if you will.

I'll be trying more of these pizzas in the days and weeks to come, so stay tuned. I know there are some good ones. If you've tried this pizza and you love it, please let me know in the comments below. I welcome dissenting opinions, and I have been wrong once or twice ;-)

I'll give it a 6 out of 10.