Tillamook - Chocolate Covered Strawberry

Tillamook - Chocolate Covered Strawberry - Sweet Mascarpone Gelato with Oregon Strawberry Sauce and Dark Chocolate Fudge Pieces

I'm back to my usual grocery store this week and they've rearranged the ice cream section a bit.  One of those changes is a new brand is now being stocked called Tillamook.  The Tillamook brand hails from its namesake small town of Tillamook, Oregon which is located in a rain-soaked coastal river valley.  The first settlers of that valley saw all the green grass and figured that was a great place to raise dairy cows. There has been a creamery there ever since.  If you visit Tillamook, you tour the creamery.  How do I know this?  Two groups of people I know have independently toured it in the past few years.  My vacation pals went there the year before I started going on vacation with them and my sister went there with her husband.  Tillamook was known early and is still most famous for their cheese, but they've branched out to other dairy products.  They started making basic flavors of ice cream in the 1940s and added premium flavors in the 1970s.  Scanning the flavor list, some of them are ice creams, some gelatos and some frozen custards, evidently varying based on what they feel is appropriate for each flavor and mix-in combination.  For the pint of Chocolate Covered Strawberry, they've chosen to implement it as a gelato.

On to the pint!  Opening the lid reviews a large heap of dark chocolate fudge pieces on the very top.  One of the brands I used to eat as a kid used to do this but this is the first I've seen this in these reviews.  Right under the dark chocolate fudge pieces is a layer of strawberry sauce.  Interestingly, I find as I eat my way into the pint, the strawberry sauce is only on the top layer.  Underneath is only mascarpone and fudge.  Then halfway down there is another layer of strawberry sauce and then just macarpone and fudge again on the bottom.  I took an extra picture below where you can see this  layering through the translucent container.  The use of a strawberry sauce rather than having strawberry pieces or using a strawberry base is another interesting choice.  It's provides a concentrated strawberry but its a mix-in that stays soft in the frozen pint.  I've noticed that pieces of strawberry can easily become frozen which can create an unpleasant biting sensation so using a sauce eliminates concern.  The sauce here was a bit tart which surprised me because I tend to think of strawberry as normally being a very sweet.  The mascarpone base was very delicious,  it was so thick and creamy.  Mascarpone itself is thick and creamy and they use buttermilk to make it thicker and creamier.  The dark chocolate fudge pieces were extremely numerous and very crunchy providing a lot of chocolate flavor.

I liked this pint and appreciated the unique implementation.  I must admit that the layering threw me a bit as large sections of this pint were strawberry-free.  The mascarpone and fudge was amazing by itself but I think I would have preferred if the strawberry was swirled in a bit more.  Perhaps I was supposed to stir it up with my spoon first.  The high quality of the base will have me returning to try other Tillamook flavors, that's for sure.