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Being Portland and all, we could not neglect our vegan brethren in our month-long ice cream roundup, Scoops' our for Summer.
Vegan soft serve at Back to Eden Bakery
2217 NE Alberta St., 477-5022, backtoedenbakery.com.
Price per scoop: $3
Most popular flavor: OK, I screwed up and didn't ask. There are only two flavors, and everyone at the store during my visit ordered chocolate.
The person in front of me: Asked which vegan quiche had the lowest calories.
Best for: Health freaks.
Vegan soft serve. Gross, right? Ponder this:
The ingredients in the soy-based soft serve sold at Portland's Back to Eden Bakery: Beet sugar, corn maltodextrin, soymilk powder, natural vanilla extract, soy protein, guar gum, xanthan gum, salt.
The ingredients in Dairy Queen soft serve: Milkfat and nonfat milk, sugar, corn syrup, whey, mono and diglycerides, artificial flavour, guar gum, Polysorbate 80, carrageenan and vitamin A palmitate.
You might be as pleasantly surprised as I was to find soft serve made without the involvement of a cow can be just as good, possibly even less gross, than the real thing.
Back to Eden is a cutesy vegan bakery across the road from an "alternative" pet food store and a vegan juice truck. In other words: it's on Alberta Street. Amongst shabby-chic "garden" decor theme (among other things, fence posts, a ladder and a shovel are all inexplicably mounted on the wall), the tiny store holds a small case of cruelty-free baked goods, an espresso machine, and, the purpose of my visit, a real life soft serve machine.
The soft serve (made by Temptation out of Chicago) comes in vanilla or chocolate. I got chocolate, because duh. It was smooth, thick, super sweet and strongly resembled really cold chocolate cake batter.
Let us never doubt vegan soft serve again.
More Scoops' out for Summer
Day 7: Great Northwest Ice Cream Co.
Day 6: Cool Harry's Yogurt
Day 5: Ohana Hawaiian Cafe
Day 4: Roses Ice Cream
Day 3: Stella Gelato at Spella Caffe
Day 2: Oregon Ice Works
Day 1: What's the Scoop?
WWeek 2015