Do premium ice creams—the kind sold in small pint- or quart-sized packages—taste better than mass-market brands sold in half-gallons tubs? Should be an easy question to answer, right? But it's not—even though the differences between the two styles are pretty clear. When ice cream is churned, air is incorporated. If no air were added, the ice cream would be hard and stiff, like an ice cube. Manufacturers can control the amount of air added to the ice cream mixture before it freezes. This air, called overrun, can increase the volume of the ice cream by as little as 20 percent (this is typical of premium brands) or as much as 100 percent (typical of mass-market brands). More overrun produces a fluffy, light ice cream with more air and less of everything else, including fat. Less overrun produces a creamy, dense ice cream with little air and a lot of fat. So when you buy a fluffy ice cream packed in a half-gallon container, you're buying a fair amount of air. But this may not be as bad as it sounds. When we conducted a blind tasting of seven best-selling brands, two reigned over the rest—one brand, as it turned out, for each style of ice cream. Fans of premium ice cream praised one brand for having a dense, creamy texture and an intense flavor they found reminiscent of fine bittersweet chocolate. Meanwhile, tasters who preferred a mass-market competitor liked it for its fluffy texture and sweet, milk-chocolaty flavor. The other five brands weren't bad—we're talking about ice cream, after all. But tasters did downgrade them for weak flavor and/or icy texture.

See the Results