Via Serious Eats, here’s a post from Road Food Digest about the best ice cream in New England. Three of their regular contributors trekked to 50 places that sell their own ice cream all over the six New England states and rated each and every one using vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce as their standard for judging.
Four of the fifty rated stands received perfect five-star scores: Tubby’s in Wayne, ME; Herrell’s in Allston, MA; Sundae School in Dennisport, MA; and Shaw’s Ridge Farm in Sanford, ME. The two Massachusetts locations are actually multiple-store local chains (Herrell’s, for example, is also in Cambridge and Northampton, MA), so it’s probably safe to say any of the locations you might visit would have the same quality products. The two Maine stores are single locations.
I have to say that I have never been to any of these four places, not even Herrell’s. They seem to be the most enthusiastic about Tubby’s, which is in one of the little towns around Augusta. It has only been open for a few years, so it lacks the sort of legendary reputation that some of the other places on the full list merit, but if the ice cream is as good as they say, I would be willing to make the trip on some future visit to Maine. We try to make at least one stop every year at Hodgman’s Frozen Custard in New Gloucester, which is a lot closer to my old stomping grounds than Wayne, and they would probably have made this list as well except for the critical distinction between frozen custard and ice cream (namely, the use of eggs in the custard base).
(My friend Jo spends time at a summer cottage in that neck of the woods in Maine, so I’m hoping she might be able to chime in with a first-hand account of Tubby’s…or maybe she can plan a visit there to tell us about it.)
Obviously, I need to check out Herrell’s, which is smack in the middle of Harvard Square, and for which I have no excuse for never having visited. All I can say in my defense is that we’re usually not looking for ice cream when we’re in Harvard Square, so I’ve just never bothered.
Sanford, Maine is also a little out of our usual beaten path, but I’m sure we can get there as well. I’ve only ever been to Cape Cod once and didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, so it’s fairly unlikely we’ll go out of our way to go to Dennisport for ice cream. I’ll just take their word for it.
There are quite a few places that got three or four stars that we are well-acquainted with: Brown’s in York Beach, ME, Bedford Farms in Bedford, MA, Kimball Farms in Westford, MA, Lizzy’s in Waltham, MA, and so on. Those are some truly outstanding ice cream stands, too, so these top four must really border on the incredible to garner five stars.
The one thing I will say about all of these places is that they give you just too darn much ice cream. True, you do pay a premium price and there is something to be said about getting your money’s worth, but I have found that if I order anything bigger than a kiddie cone at a place like Bedford Farms or Richardson’s, it’s more than I can eat. And believe me, I am a serious ice cream person. But nobody needs to eat an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting, which is about what you get on a “regular” cone.
