Tesco Caramel Vanilla Ice Cream

What is it?

Chewy is the word on the pack and it's doing real work. Caramel in ice cream can arrive as a sauce, which stays soft, or as pieces, which usually go hard in the cold. A chewy piece is formulated to do neither. The trick is sugar content. Enough of it lowers the freezing point far enough that the piece never fully sets, so it stays soft against a frozen base where a lower-sugar inclusion would turn into a shard. Vanilla underneath keeps out of the way, which is what a base carrying this much caramel needs to do. Caramel is one of the few inclusions that can be scaled up without becoming cloying, since the salt and butter notes in it cut against the sugar.