Duff Goldman's Favorite Ice Cream Can Be Found At Almost Every Grocery Store

Great desserts don't have to cost a lot, feature little-known ingredients, or be hard to find. Take ice cream, for example. Celebrity pastry chef Duff Goldman has likely sampled all kinds of gourmet ice cream and gelato, but when it comes to the one he likes most, it's Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream. Goldman likes splashing Kahlua liqueur into his desserts, so he is obviously a big fan of coffee flavor — he believes the widely available version from Häagen-Dazs best marries it with ice cream.

Goldman described Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream as "rich and velvety and just perfect" to Mashed and explained why it's a step above the rest: "I think one, it's probably the coffee that they're using, but two, I think it's just because it's premium, so it doesn't have a lot of overrun." Häagen-Dazs' coffee ice cream is made with Brazilian coffee beans and just four other ingredients: cream, skim milk, cane sugar, and egg yolks. This ice cream is actually designated as "super premium," a term that means the product is high in fat, uses high-quality ingredients, and has very low overrun.

The amount of air that is whipped into ice cream is known as the overrun. The lower the overrun, the richer and creamier it is, and Häagen-Dazs' overrun is only around 20%. Interestingly, Rose Mattus, who founded Häagen-Dazs in 1960 with her husband Reuben, said the low overrun began as a fluke. That signature texture came about because of a broken air injector at a processing plant early on.

The coffee ice cream that Duff Goldman stans was one of Häagen-Dazs' three original flavors, along with vanilla and chocolate. They also have two other coffee flavors: Coffee Chip with chocolate chips, and Coffee Chocolate Brownie (coffee ice cream, brownies, espresso chocolate sauce, and espresso chocolate chips). If those ingredients have you wondering about caffeine, coffee ice cream does actually contain caffeine, just like there is alcohol in Häagen-Dazs' boozy flavors. However, there's usually not a lot of it, although it varies by brand. A ½ cup of Häagen-Dazs' coffee ice cream has 21.6 milligrams of caffeine, well below the 95 milligrams in a typical 8-ounce cup of coffee.

Do Americans like coffee ice cream as much as Goldman? There is a National Coffee Ice Cream Day that's celebrated on September 6. But according to a 2024 survey from the International Dairy Foods Association, coffee doesn't even make the top 10 most popular ice cream flavors in the U.S. However, different parts of the country prefer different flavors, and the Northeast particularly likes coffee ice cream. (Maybe it's all the Dunkin' love in New England.)

All coffee ice cream isn't the same, and the kind you like may reflect how you take your coffee. While Häagen-Daazs' is like coffee with lots of cream and sugar, other brands have coffee ice cream that's more like stronger dark roast coffee or espresso, sometimes even with small coffee bean flecks mixed in.

Static Media owns and operates both Mashed and The Takeout.