Green Tea isn’t the only green tea ice cream Häagen-Dazs makes these days.
Like many of Japan’s sweets suppliers, Häagen-Dazs Japan is continually rotating special limited-time flavors into its lineup. Their newest, which went on sale July 22, is Gyokuro, named after the green tea of the same name.
Now if you’re thinking “Wait a second, I could have sworn I’d seen green tea Häagen-Dazs in Japan before this,” don’t worry, you haven’t been having dessert delusions. Not only does Häagen-Dazs Japan already have a green tea flavor, Green Tea (or “Guriin Tii,” as it’s pronounced in its official in-Japanese rendering) is one of their permanent flavors.
In other words, the new Gyokuro flavor hasn’t pushed Green Tea out of convenience store/supermarket freezer cases. Right now, Häagen-Dazs Japan has two different green tea flavors on sale, and that made us curious as to just how different they actually are.
First, though, just what is gyokuro? As defined by the Japan Tea Central Association, gyokuro is a green tea made using leaves harvested from plants grown under covers to shade it from the sun for roughly 20 days, with the covers made of materials such as reeds or cloth and put in place when the ichibancha (first-harvest) buds begin to show. As you can probably guess, this delicate cultivation adds time and expense to the production process, but the smaller, pricier yields are worth it to green tea enthusiasts, who hold gyokuro’s extra-deep flavor in high esteem.
▼ A cup of gyokuro tea
Gyokuro’s premium status is reflected in Häagen-Dazs’ ice cream version. Whereas our local 7-Eleven branch was selling the brand’s regular Green Tea flavor for 325 yen (US$2.25), the Gyokuro set us back 370 yen, and that’s actually less than the suggested retail price of 400 yen. Oh, and the Gyokuro Häagen-Dazs is slightly smaller too, with its tub containing 100 milliliters (3.4 ounces) of ice cream, 10 fewer than the Standard Green Tea’s.
We started with a visual check. It’s a little hard to see in camera-captured images, but when viewed with the naked, tea-loving eye, the Gyokuro Häagen-Dazs is a brighter shade of green than the Green Tea. Since neither ice cream uses any artificial coloring or aromas, we think it’s safe to credit the difference to the quality of the powdered gyokuro leaves and gyokuro extract that Häagen-Dazs puts into the new flavor.
▼ Green Tea on the left, Gyokuro on the right
Sliding a spoon into each, we didn’t notice any contrast in consistency between the too, suggesting that they contain similar ratios of cream as well, so this was feeling like it really was going to come down to a matter of the two types of tea themselves in terms of any differences in flavor.
We stared with the Green Tea to establish a baseline, and it tasted like ordinary, average matcha ice cream. To be clear, that’s not a criticism. Japan has high standards for sweets across the board, and especially so for green tea desserts, so an ordinary, middle-of-the-pack green tea ice cream is still very, very tasty. However, we wouldn’t say that the Häagen-Dazs Green Tea dramatically distinguishes itself from most other authentic matcha ice creams in Japan.
But the Häagen-Dazs Gyokuro?
Ah, now this was something special! While the difference in flavor is noticeable when drinking a cup of gyokuro compared to standard green tea, we weren’t sure if that would carry over to their ice cream forms. It definitely does, though, and the Gyokuro Häagen-Dazs has much stronger tea notes. With the Green Tea, there’s an element of sweetness that sticks with you all the way through the flavor profile and lingers into the aftertaste. The Gyokuro, though, gives you just a quick initial sensation of sweetness on the tongue, but by the time you swallow, it’s just the rich tea notes that are lighting up your taste buds, with even a touch of umami, we wrote while in our taste-testing notes while nodding in satisfaction.
So yes, it turns out there’s a reason for the Häagen-Dazs Green Tea and Gyokuro to both exist, since they’re both delicious, but in different ways. However, we should note that if green tea desserts don’t make up as major a part of your diet as they do ours, the flavor of the Gyokuro isn’t going to beat you over the head with its characteristic charms, so you might want to arrange a little green tea ice cream ceremony for yourself and try them both in the same sitting to really appreciate their differences. After all, double desserts are perfectly acceptable if they’re part of a cultural experience, right?
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