Ben & Jerry's - The Tonight Dough starring Jimmy Fallon

The Tonight Dough starring Jimmy Fallon - Caramel & Chocolate Ice Creams with Chocolate Cookie Swirls & Gobs of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough & Peanut Butter Cookie Dough

I finally found a pint of the brand new The Tonight Dough after a few weeks of scouring stores for the flavor.  The dark blue Tonight Show logo background of the carton really sticks out in the freezer case.  To get you psyched for the review, here are a couple of videos from the Tonight Show.

First is Ben & Jerry visiting the Tonight Show to help unveil the new flavor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqzeFa2_SI

Second is Jimmy having fun with customers at his local B&J Scoop Shop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkLZoftCtyI

OK.  On with the review.  There are a lot of ingredients in this flavor.  Chocolate & Caramel ice cream bases, a chocolate cookie swirl and two types of cookie dough -- chocolate chip and peanut butter.  How will they fit all of this into one pint?

Opening the lid, the top was surprisingly dark and chocolatey.  As I started eating my way into the pint, I discovered that the chocolate cookie swirl was the secret weapon of this flavor.  The dough is getting all of the publicity but it is really the chocolate cookie swirl which is the highlight.   It had the pie-crust texture of a graham cracker swirl, but had a strong chocolate flavor.  Note that the two base flavors (chocolate and caramel) are themselves swirled together each individual base flavor is relatively subtle.  The base flavors themselves were not that strong.  As mentioned in other reviews, Ben & Jerry's caramel ice cream serves mainly as a creamy, non-vanilla base and the chocolate base flavor was mild compared to the cookie swirl.

Then on top of this was the cookie dough chunks.  The chunks were relatively numerous, but not overly so.  Having two types of cookie dough did not mean twice as much cookie dough, it was the same amount of cookie dough as is present in other cookie dough flavors.  Having two different types of flavors did add a bit of mystery to the eating experience because when you got some cookie dough in your spoon, you would be like "is this a gob of chocolate chip cookie dough, or a gob of peanut butter cookie dough?" and you would not know until you bit into it which one it was.  The peanut butter cookie dough had a more noticeable flavor.  Perhaps it provided more of a contrast to the cookie swirl.  The peanut butter dough has a nutty flavor (as opposed to a creamy flavor).

I enjoyed this flavor much more than I expected.  I am not really a cookie dough nut, but the cookie swirl made the flavor for me.  I am almost disappointed that I am on this review-writing kick because I feel like I have to eat a different-flavored pint every time and I would not mind having this flavor again soon. 

One final note is that this does official mark the retirement of Jimmy Fallon's previous flavor "Late Night Snack", named after his previous show.  The unique feature of that flavor was fudge-covered potato-chip clusters.  It will be interesting to see if Ben & Jerry's manages to work that feature into another flavor at some point in the future.