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: So Delicious “Cookie Dough” Coconut Milk Frozen Dessert

For us lactose intolerant folk, sometimes the options in terms of dairy-free frozen treats feel a bit limited. I love sorbets and dairy-free gelatos, but they tend to be expensive and are often hard to find and limited in flavour variety. Soy or tofu based frozen desserts can be OK, but they can also be absolutely awful, and it's hard to get a texture that isn't rock hard when you're using soy. So I was excited to learn from a friend, who is also lactose intolerant, that there are now ice cream-like frozen desserts made from coconut milk. This is a great option for people, like me, who don't like soy because of how it can affect your body's estrogen production or because of an allergy (although coconut is also a common allergen). I am a big coconut fan to begin with, so I was excited to try these out!

When J and I made our last venture into Fairway Market and finally found the Island Farms Green Tea flavour, we also found two brands (!) of coconut milk ice cream for sale (OK, it's not really ice cream, but it's a lot easier to type). The first was Luna and Larry's, and the second was So Delicious, a company that is more well known for making soy beverages and soy ice creams. While I'm sure we will go back and review a Luna and Larry's flavour in the future, the So Delicious brand was less expensive at the time of purchase, so we opted for that. There were several flavours available, including a coconut one. While we thought it would probably be safe to go with the coconut flavour, considering what it's made of, we wanted to be able to compare this to a regular dairy-based ice cream, so we chose a common ice cream-like flavour, one that we have already reviewed from different brands: cookie dough. According to the company's website, this flavour is also gluten free.

Apparently this is the "old" packaging, but the product should be the same.

For this review we are joined once again by AG, who was a big help to us in our review of Island Farms Green Tea. This ice cream is coconut milk based with large pieces of cookie dough and chocolate chunks throughout. It was quite easy to scoop out, and we didn't have the frozen solid cookie dough problem that we had with Ben and Jerry's, despite the size of the pieces.

We were impressed by the cookie dough right off the bat. Not only were they in big chunks, but there were little mini chocolate chips in it. This seemed like the kind of stuff you could actually bake cookies out of, and while we debated trying it, by the time we had gotten around to making any kind of decision...we had already finished the ice cream. We also appreciated that the cookie dough wasn't too sweet, letting the chocolate chunks and the ice cream carry the sugar in this dessert. The chocolate was somewhat crispy, sweet but not too sweet, and So Delicious was very generous in the amount of mix-ins they gave us, unlike some of the brands of traditional cookie dough ice cream we tried.

And now the part you are probably wondering about: the ice cream base. Well if you expected that it would taste like coconut....you would be correct. And the coconut and ice cream combination takes some getting used to. At times we were almost getting like a marzipan flavour coming through. When you eat it together with the cookie dough, the coconut flavour becomes a bit less evident, but when you get it on its own you're reminded that, oh yea, you're eating a coconut milk ice cream. The ice cream is also quite sweet, but again this kind of balances with the less sweet cookie dough. AG commented that the ice cream base “tastes more like body lotion than ice cream,” and it does kind of give me flashbacks to The Body Shop's Coconut Body Butter. The coconut milk taste + cookie dough is not a bad combination, it's just kind of weird, and we're not sure that it totally works, at least not in the way we expected it to.

Recommend to a friend? If you're lactose intolerant, you should try this. While the combination is unconventional, it is still enjoyable and a nice alternative to soy-based frozen desserts. We give So Delicious serious props for the quality of the product and their generosity with the mix-ins.

Repurchase? We'd like to try some of the other coconut milk ice cream varieties rather than repurchase this particular one. It was OK, but not really our thing.

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!)