Popular Litchfield County Dairy Farm Crowned Connecticut’s Best Ice Cream

Every week, another website or "local influencer" comes out with a "Best of" list to try to grab our weary attention. I tend to pay more attention when these places pick one of my personal favorites, and that's what happened over the weekend.

Food & Wine, the monthly American magazine and website for foodies, came out with a mega-list of the best ice cream in every US state. There are a lot of great local producers of premium ice cream here in Connecticut: Rich Farm, Ferris Acres, Big Dipper, Ashely's, and the UConn Dairy Bar. But my favorite for a few years now has been the incredible ice cream that Arethusa Farm in Bantam/Litchfield creates.

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Obviously, I'm not alone in my love for their luxuriously decadent ice cream, Arethusa has seen incredible growth of their empire across Connecticut over the past decade, adding dedicated ice cream stores in Bantam, New Haven and West Hartford, plus the world-class Arethusa al tavolo Restaurant, and Arethusa a mano, both in Bantam.

Those pampered cows at the incredibly bright white and black farm on Rt. 63 produce, in my opinion, Connecticut's best milk and the by-products of that milk are in turn, the best. Arethusa's half & half is the best creamer that I've ever used in my life, their cheese, butter, yogurt and eggnog are all first choice among national-caliber competition products.

But their best product, in my opinion and Food & Wine's, is their ice cream. Food & Wine agrees and crowns them Connecticut's best ice cream by saying Arethusa serves "Plush, high-butterfat ice creams in pleasingly classic New England flavors like rum raisin and coffee, made with some of the best milk and cream in the state."

And it's true, oh, it's damn true. My personal favorite Arethusa Ice Cream flavor is the classic Sweet Cream Chocolate Chip and the Old Fashioned Coffee is also insanely great. Mrs. Large swears by the Old Fashioned Mint Chocolate Chip. Any of them are better than anything you've had recently. Good call Food & Wine.