Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Orange Leaf

Frozen yogurt is making a comeback. In my mind, frogurt has gone through two phases: 1) being the low-cal alternative to ice cream, and 2) being itself. It may be that our collective palettes are maturing. Or that the tart flavor of the yogurt tastes more "natural." Or maybe we just love things that come in ultra-modern, Asian-ish packages. Whatever the cause, frogurt is in and it's delicious.

Orange Leaf

The newest frozen yogurt shop in the Triangle is Orange Leaf in Chapel Hill's Timberlyne plaza. As you can see from this picture on a Saturday night, this place is popular, and it has good reason to be. If you've read my previous post about Local Yogurt, then you already know that our area is blessed with a wonderful yogurt shop. Local Yogurt serves up four flavors of yogurt plus a large plethora of toppings, all charged a la carte. But Orange Leaf has a different perspective. They have around 15 flavors (plus twists) and lots of toppings. The clincher is that everything is priced by weight. So you can have as much or as little of nearly every flavor in this store possible.

Flavor Roulette

When I first walked in, my mind could not handle all of the possibilities. I would have more pictures of everything if there were not so many people that may have been offended to be filmed. I don't even want to start calculating all the flavor combinations. My plan of attack was to create five mini forgurt sections in my large cup. Without going into too much detail, I tried pomegranate, peanut butter, mango, taro, and pineapple. They also had cheesecake, blueberry, plain, coffee, green tea (not as good as the others), and many more. For toppings, I used Reese's Pieces, brownie, Rice Krispie treat (a little stale), mochi, gummi worms, Rainsinettes, and one of the coolest toppings I've ever come across. They are called bursting boba and they look like differently colored fish eggs. If you're familiar with bubble tea, these are similar to the boba in those drinks. The difference is that these are balls of juice encapsulated in a thin membrane. The slightest pressure on that membrane and *pop* a burst of fruit juice in your mouth. In the end, I had five microcosms of flavor from which to eat on a hot summer night. I love having lots of little flavor options with my food, so needless to say, I was in heaven at Orange Leaf.

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