Review: Tesco Free-From Choc Ice Sticks

Own-brand vegan 'magnums', vanilla ice cream with thick chocolate coating. Three packs in the 'Free From' freezer section. We recently reviewed the Swedish Glace version of these and suddenly we're spoilt for choice with vegan choc ice lollies. These ones are made from lupin rather than soy:

Review: Swedish Glace 'Choc Ice' Lollies

Strawberry flavour choccy-coated soya ice creams... on sticks. 5 in a pack. These have been available for a month or two at the big supermarkets, and have appeared at the same time as some own-brand alternatives (which we'll review later).

Review: Tesco Strawberry & Vanilla Cones

Vegan cornettos. An unseasonal review, but our Best of 2015 list is coming up, and these may well be on it! These dairy-free cones arrived back in spring, and we took these photos in June, but we never posted the review...

There have been dairy-free cones on the market before, including the two in our review from 2012, but this is the first supermarket own-brand offering. Let's see how they compare:

Review: Almond Dream Ice Cream

Dairy-free, made from almond milk, by the Rice Dream people. Velvety Vanilla and Mint Chocolate Chip. We finally found some of this in a Little Waitrose, but not the two most exciting flavours - the Praline Crunch and the Salted Caramel were not stocked unfortunately. We'll add those when we find them, but does Almond Dream live up to the hype?

Review: CoYo Ice Cream

Coconut-milk ice cream in raw chocolate, vanilla & nutmeg, and sticky date & tamarind flavours. Dairy-free ice cream that's also soya free. If you love CoYo yoghurts (and who doesn't), you'll welcome the arrival of their ice cream. It's got some interesting flavour options:

Review: Mamma Cucina Ice Cream

Dairy-free frozen soya dessert from the Tofutti sister brand, in Vanilla and Strawberry flavours. Vegan ice cream is in every supermarket, and there are now some great non-dairy ice creams like Food Heaven. Mamma Cucina's dairy free range includes cheesecakes, quiches and pizzas, but is their ice cream any good?

Review: Biovegan 1001 Eis

Vegan ice cream powder. Three minutes prep for dairy-free ice cream. Biovegan are a German vegan producer who specialise in organic packet mixes, from sauces, to bread mixes and desserts. These ice cream powders are sold through Plamil in the UK. Are they worth the online order...and the faff?

Review: Buono Ice Cream Mochi

Dough balls with coconut milk ice cream filling. We previewed these last September and promised a full review - so here it is. There was some doubt that these were vegan initially, as the packs don't even state that they're vegetarian. We wrote to the UK distributor who assured us that they're vegetarian as well as non-dairy, which is great news for lovers of vegan ice cream:

Review: Booja Booja Dairy-Free Ice Cream

Mini-tubs of premium vegan ice cream that come with spoons, in Vanilla, Coconut and Chocolate flavours. Continuing our 'frozen' theme of late, which we should have done in August rather than as autumn arrives... These mini pots of ice cream have been around for a couple of years, but we're revisiting them to compare them to recent arrivals on the vegan ice cream scene:

Review: Food Heaven Dairy-Free Ice Cream

Vegan ice cream from @FoodHeaven in Rich Chocolate, Cool Vanilla and Wild Blueberry flavours. Jodi Anderson and the team at Food Heaven have put together a great range of dairy-free foods, with this dairy-free ice cream now widely available. You may be familiar with Food Heaven's frozen cheesecakes, and they're soon to launch a dairy-free tiramisu too! We checked out the ice cream on a sunny September weekend...

[P]review: Buono Ice Cream Mochi



That's right, preview rather than review. We haven't verified that these are even vegetarian yet, but we're pretty sure they are. They're labelled Dairy-Free, but not as vegetarian, and a couple of the ingredients could be from animal fat. Buono make other products with the same ingredients that are labelled as vegetarian, so we're pretty sure this is an oversight. We've reached out to the distributor to establish the facts, and await their reply.

We hope they're kosher, because they're rather good:

UPDATE: These are confirmed as vegetarian, as well as dairy-free (and have no other possible animal ingredients listed) and they therefore meet our review criteria as being vegan.

Review: Reese's Shell Ice Cream Topping

Chocolate and Peanut Butter ice cream shell topping from Reese's - the peanut butter cup makers. Vegans have to get their peanut butter cups from elsewhere, but Reese's Shell topping is dairy-free. You can top off your favourite dairy-free ice cream with this intriguing flavour shell:

Review: Askeys Crackin Chocolate Ice Cream Topping

Vegan 'Ice Magic'... a hard-setting chocolate shell topping for ice cream. Just like Ice Magic, this is a chocolate sauce that you pour on ice cream that sets instantly to form a chocolate shell:

New: Tesco Choc Dipped Waffle Cones

Vegan ice cream cornets with a chocolate coating. The sun was out at the weekend and it's perfect timing for us to notice these tasty new waffle cones from Tesco. Crispy sweet cones dipped in thick chocolate...it's almost the shortcut to a 'cornetto' style ice cream. We filled them with some dairy-free vanilla ice cream and took them out into the sunshine:

Roving Review: Razzle Dazzle Ice Cream

The last of our WMVF reviews is South-West independent vegan ice cream makers Razzle Dazzle. Their vegan ice cream is not available in our part of the country so we took the opportunity to sample three flavours at their stall in Wolverhampton last week. The flavours we sampled were Coconilla, Cookie Dough and Hintamint:

Review: Carousel Waffle Cones for Ice Cream

We only recently ran our ice cream cone taste test but have now found another UK source of vegan cones for ice creams. Carousel were included in our original test with their sugar-free cones, but they also make these premium waffle cones which are vegan too. Unlike the other waffle cones we found, these ones are not gluten-free, but then they don't attract that 'Free From' premium price either. We grabbed some dairy-free ice cream and took these cones out for a taste test.

Vegan Ice Cream Cones: Swedish Glace -v- Tofutti

Forget the wet summer weather, let's eat ice cream! We're talking ice cream cones today, the type you buy from the freezer cabinet. Like a Cornetto, but for vegans. There are two on the market in the UK in the form of Swedish Glace 'Peak' cones and Toffuti 'Rock n Roll' cones. They both come in multi-packs but if you're lucky you can find them sold singly too, which is handy if you can't eat four at once! They cost about the same, and look very similar...but which is best?..

Flavour Fave: Bessant & Drury's Ice Cream

The vegan ice cream market is still a land of opportunity with a just a few established brands, some better than others in our experience. Bessant & Drury's are the latest to stake their claim to a corner of the dairy-free market with their range of coconut-milk ice creams. They were in the fortunate position of being the only ice cream vendor on site in the scorching heat at last weekend's VegFest. So is Bessant & Drury's a case of ice dream, or I scream?