Review: Ben and Jerry's "Milk and Cookies" Ice Cream

After seeing some rave reviews about this product on other blogs and websites, I was pretty excited to give this Ben and Jerry's flavour a try. And I was certainly not disappointed. This stuff is like cookies n' cream on steroids!

The part I enjoyed most was the dark cookie “swirl” which felt to me like a ribbon of crushed up oreo cookie pieces. It had a nice crunchy texture and pleasingly chocolatey taste to it, and it made a nice contrast to the chewier pieces of chocolate chip cookie dough. The cookie dough pieces had a good flavour that pervaded through most of the ice cream, and it really did remind me of raw cookie dough – and since I spent a lot of time eating raw cookie dough when I worked in a bakery at a grocery store chain that will remain nameless, I have a pretty solid reference point. :) Because the cookie elements of this product were fairly sweet, I also appreciated that the vanilla ice cream provided a cool and refreshing “neutral” background.

Overall, I liked this flavour a lot. It had a really nice balance of flavours, textures, and sugar levels, and I think it's a really interesting and successful take on a cookies n cream/cookie dough hybrid.

Recommend to a friend? Definitely

Repurchase? Yes – this one is worth the price tag

Review: Ben and Jerry's "Half Baked"

You know what sucks? Getting swamped in school work and planning and having to put blog reviews on the back burner for a week. You know what's awesome? One of the local grocery stores having Ben and Jerry's ice cream on sale for half price. With the financial burden of purchasing this brand lightened somewhat, I can finally get down to trying some new flavours – rejoice!

The first one I decided to sample was Ben and Jerry's Half Baked, a combination of vanilla and chocolate ice creams with cookie dough and brownie pieces mixed in. I was pretty optimistic about this one heading in, so I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed overall. The price of having high standards, I guess?

First things first, I really loved about 80% of this product. Both the chocolate and vanilla ice creams were of Ben and Jerry's usual excellent quality (the conclusion I've come to is that the vanilla we experienced in If I Had 1,000,000 Flavours was, indeed, a fluke), and I particularly enjoyed the flavour of the vanilla. The brownie pieces were very fudgey and had the nice texture of the slightly underdone brownie that is soft and gooey and oozes chocolate.

However, the other 20% of the ice cream was the cookie dough, and I found it to be a bit of a let down. Now, we tried their cookie dough flavour ice cream before and the cookie dough in that product, though it did freeze more solidly than we would have liked, was quite good. The cookie dough in this carton of Half Baked was not just hard, it was dry and crumbly, and overall just not very nice. I found myself trying to avoid the cookie dough and, when it did end up on my spoon, chew through it as fast as possible just to get it over with. Which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since they should be using the same stuff for both flavours, no? If this is another “fluke” inconsistency, then Ben and Jerry's seriously need to look at some quality control!

Recommend to a friend? The non-cookie dough parts of this were great, and if the texture of the dough was improved I would recommend this. As it is, I'm not sure I could justify telling someone to pay full price for this.

Repurchase? As per the comments above, if the dough was better, yes. Otherwise, no.

Review: Ben and Jerry's "If I Had 1,000,000 Flavours" Ice Cream

As proud Canadians, we were excited to get our hands on this creation by Ben and Jerry's: If I Had 1,000,000 Flavours. Note the "u" in "flavours"! This is one of several Ben and Jerry's ice creams based on songs or bands, and is inspired by the Barenaked Ladies song "If I Had A Million Dollars". True, BNL has had some scandal over the past couple of years, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the song that still frequents the muzak of grocery stores everywhere. Especially when it comes in ice cream form.

Disappointingly, this ice cream does not literally contain 1,000,00 flavours, but I supposed that would have been extremely hard to fit into one carton. It's a "collision of chocolate & vanilla ice creams mixed with chocolate-covered toffee, white chocolate chunks, peanut butter cups, and chocolate-covered almonds." It's 999,994 flavours short of a million, but it still sounds delicious and does give more variety than the average pint.

We divided the cartoon between us and dug in to see just how many flavours we could find. There was a fairly even distribution of chocolate and vanilla ice creams, and the chocolate was quite nice. The vanilla tasted OK but it had this weird gritty texture to it. I didn't notice it at first, but once J called my attention to it, it was pretty hard to ignore. It wasn't ice crystals or mix-ins. It was almost...dusty feeling and not at all pleasant. And it was only present in the vanilla for some reason.

In the battle of penny VS peanut butter cup, the peanut butter cup takes home the prize!

As for the mix-ins, Ben and Jerry's did not skimp, especially on the peanut butter cups. Those suckers were HUGE. The white chocolate chunks were also a decent size, and while we found very few chocolate-covered almonds, they were a nice size. J swears she found a chocolate covered peanut in hers, not something listed in the ingredients. However, neither of us were able to find any toffee in either of our bowls. Overall, we felt like the distribution was more like "If I Had 1,000,000 Peanut Butter Cups" than "1,000,000 Flavours".

Our overall feeling on this flavour is that is was good but it felt more like variations on the theme of chocolate, rather than the true mix that is suggested by the name. We love peanut butter cups, and chocolate, but would have loved even more the addition of something like cookie pieces, caramel, nuts, coconut... And the dusty, gritty texture of the vanilla was really hard to ignore. Perhaps having a more even distribution of mix-ins would've made this a more exciting experience (and actually having some toffee would have been nice!)

There is also a nice article written about the band's reaction to the release of this flavour.

Recommend to a friend? Yes, especially if you consider yourself to be a chocoholic. We think that the texture issue with the vanilla was a freak occurrence, but if it was not, then we would be much more hesitant to recommend this.
Repurchase? J: If the texture of the vanilla was improved, yes. B: Since this ice cream was so much about the peanut butter cups, at least in our pint, I would be inclined to get Island Farms "Moose Tracks" instead and get more ice cream for my money.

Flavour Showdown: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Sometimes a classic flavour like vanilla, chocolate, or cookies n' creme is made by several different brands. If they're all similarly priced, how do you decide which to choose?

Thus the inspiration for tonight's Ultimate Flavour Showdown. Since I was already planning to attend a party tonight with a group of classmates, I decided to bring three variations on the flavour of chocolate chip cookie dough, made by Ben & Jerry's, Breyers, and Island Farms so my classmates could help me decide which brand truly captured the essence of cookie dough in ice cream form. As I went through the check-out at the grocery store, the man behind me, after I explained why I was buying so much ice cream, expressed his confidence that Ben & Jerry's would be the clear winner, with Breyers in second and Island Farms coming last. Was he correct?

Which ice cream will reign supreme?

Contestant Number One: Breyers 

First up is the Breyers entry, one of their "family classics." The fact that it is called "chocolatey" chip, rather than using the word "chocolate" already tells me that it's fake chocolate, or at least doesn't have enough cocoa in it to be legally deemed chocolate. To be fair, I actually really like the taste of some fake chocolate, but it can also err on the side of horrible. Once you open it up, it's easy to scoop out, but the chocolatey pieces and cookie dough nuggets are small and extremely sparse. We had a hard time finding enough cookie dough pieces to ensure that everyone's sample actually had cookie dough in it! Not a good sign!

Contestant Number Two: Ben & Jerry's

Next we have Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. They have some other awesome-looking cookie-related flavours that I really wanted to try, but this was the fairest one for the sake of comparison. This guy had fairly substantial cookie dough pieces in it, but the real downside was that is was extremely hard to scoop any out! In retrospect, I could have left it out on the counter a bit longer, but I was feeling impatient. Trying to chisel your way through frozen-solid cookie dough is not fun!

Contestant Number Three: Island Farms

Finally we have the Island Farms version from their "Vanilla Plus" line, which was kind of middle of the road in terms of cookie dough distribution; certainly much more than Breyers anyway. Like Breyers, it was easy to scoop and had separate little nuggets of chocolate and cookie dough, rather than the Ben & Jerry's that had the chocolate chips actually mixed into the dough.

So who came out on top? We put a spoonful of each brand into plastic shot glasses on colour-coded plates, and asked the rest of the party guests to sample one from each plate, choose which they liked best, and describe what the ice cream was like. Let the fight commence!

Ice cream shots shots shot shots shots shots shots shots...

After much sampling, considering, and discussion, we took a vote. Out of eleven people, not including myself, these were the results for which brand was liked best:

Breyers: 2 people
Ben & Jerry's: 5 people
Island Farms: 4 people


Though no one really hated any of the options, Breyers did not get a lot of fans, and the primary reason was the lack of mix-ins. For a cookie dough ice cream, there just wasn't enough cookie dough! Some people also felt it was "too creamy" in an unnatural sort of way.

Island Farms was close to Ben & Jerry's, and it may have been partly due to the smaller size of the cookie dough pieces, the fact that there were more of them, and the flavour and texture of the ice cream component. Personally, I found the cookie dough in this brand to be extremely gritty, and at some points I almost felt like I was chewing on sand.

I will have to agree with the majority and say that Ben & Jerry's, as the man at the check-out predicted, was the superior product in this comparison. Their cookie dough actually seemed like something you might feasibly be able to bake cookies out of, and even though it was a giant pain in the butt to try to scoop out, it had good flavour that didn't seem artificial, and the texture wasn't offensive.

At the check-out, all three worked out to be about $6.99 CAD, but since the Breyers and Island Farms flavours were on sale, the Ben & Jerry's did have a lower regular price. Yes, it's a much smaller container, but I think this taste test shows that it is worth the money.

-B

(if anyone who helped test has anything to add, please feel free!)