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| New York Super Fudge Chunk - Chocolate Ice Cream with White & Dark Fudge Chunks, Pecans, Walnuts & Fudge-Covered Almonds |
The
New York Super Fudge Chunk flavor is one of the oldest flavors in the
Ben & Jerry's line of pints. The story behind the flavor's creation
is quite interesting. Back in 1983, Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield
were just starting to explore expansion outside of the northwestern
Vermont market -- which they thought they had covered pretty well. So
they decided to make their pints available at Dmitri's Cafe at 156
Spring Street in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. They had good word
of mouth backing so the famed food critic Gael Greene went to try it
out and published the following review in the New Yorker magazine that
fall (scroll down about six paragraphs for the section on Ben &
Jerry's)
Needless to say, "pleasant enough, but not thrilling, and the chips and bits seem rather sparse" were not words that Ben and Jerry wanted to hear. They took the review as a challenge. The response was to add extra chocolate syrup to the ice cream to strengthen its chocolate flavor and then to load it up with 40% fill-ins than they had ever added before. The extra fill-ins also made it the most expensive pint they had ever made as well. The name "New York Super Fudge Chunk" was selected and it was launched with great fanfare. The flavor was a big success thirty years ago and it still remains a popular flavor today.
Since
we're on the topic of loaded flavors in New York ice cream shops, here
is a link to a very recent Wall Street Journal article that my sister
sent me about the economics of ice cream flavors:
...
some of the exotic, tastiest and most desired fill-ins are indeed the
most expensive. So shopkeepers either have to raise their prices or
they have to rely on some customer only getting vanilla to subside the
more costly flavors.
On
to the pint of the day! Opening the lid, I was surprised to see mainly
plain chocolate. Only a hint of the fill-ins that I had been reading
so much about were visible. Eating into the pint, I encountered the
fill-ins fairly quickly. There were the fudge chips. White and dark
chips -- each rectangular shaped like the chunks of Chunky Monkey. Then
there were the nuts which added extra crunchiness to each spoonful. At
first, I was not as overwhelmed by the density of the fill-ins as I
expected to be especially after reading above articles. I think the
"40% more than any other flavor" line is a bit dated -- some of the
newer flavors are quite dense. That said, as I kept eating the pint and
the base ice cream got softer as it melted the density of fill-ins
seemed to increase as I got to the bottom. So, by any standard a very
stacked pint. Plus it was very chocolatey! I ate the entire pint in
one sitting and as I write this a half an hour later I am noticing that
the surfaces of my eyeballs are drying out from chocolate overload. I
have temporarily switched my beverage of choice from Diet Coke to water
in hopes to rebalance my ocular electrolytes. Its a good feeling though, it is like the chocolate ice cream version of having extra spicy Thai food.
So
all in all, a successful pint. I would rate it as one of the three top
chocolate flavors available from Ben & Jerry's. If you like your
chocolate gooey, then you get Phish Food with its marshmallow swirls.
If you like like your chocolate chewy, then you get Chocolate Fudge
Brownie with its stays-soft-in-the-freezer Greyston Brownies. But if
you like your chocolate chunky, you get New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Personally, I am a Phish Food guy but variety is the spice of life and I
imagine I'll have this one again.
Update: In the fall of 2018, Ben & Jerry's created a limited batch repackaging of this flavor called called Pecan Resist -- you can even see that the ice cream in the pint images at Pecan Resist and the old flavor are identical, the pint labels are swapped with photoshop. The new artwork looks really cool, though! Since this is not a new flavor, I'll just add a note here.
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