McConnell's - Sea Salt Cream & Cookies

Sea Salt Cream & Cookies - Dense, velvety smooth and creamy, Sweet Cream ice cream, a hint of local sea salt and bountiful bits of our chewy, house-made, Guittard® chocolate chunk cookies.

We return to the Santa Barbara based McConnell's to review their Sea Salt Cream & Cookies flavor.  I thought I had reviewed most of the non-homogenous McConnell's flavors carried by my local grocery store when I saw this one in the freezer case.  I'm a sucker for cookie mix-ins so I scooped this one up.  I'm excited to try this one out.

McConnell's is known for the "romance copy" that they put on the back of the pint which makes you feel like you are reading the J Peterman Catalog instead of a carton of ice cream.  The text here is fun and flowery, but with none of the wild tangents present in the other pints.  Also, the text could really apply to almost any flavor.  Still, it is fun.

Removing the lid, the top of the pint shows the sweet cream base with some of the cookie mix-ins visible right away.  Eating my way down, the sweet cream is a bit thick -- McConnell's does not inject much air into their ice cream -- but tasted good.  The sea salt is noticeable right away.  My friends tell me that there are all different types of sea salt.  This one is billed as 'local', so maybe it tastes like the surf along the coast of Santa Barbara.  Not a bad thing.  The cookie mix-ins were excellent.  Like the Ben & Jerry's Milk & Cookies flavor, these are chocolate chip cookies and not Oreo/sandwich cookies.  I actually prefer that.  These are chocolatey chocolate chip cookies, so they provide a lot of chocolate flavor but you also get the flavor of the cookies themselves.  Here the cookies are soft and almost dough-y in consistency.    The salt provided a fun accent to the cookies.  The salt flavor did build as I kept eating, so by the time I got to the bottom of the pint I had wished that I had more fully hydrated beforehand.  I'll keep that in mind for next time and its a small price to pay for a tasty pint.

I really enjoyed this pint.  I like cookies and cream and these are very tasty cookies.    Interesting to add salt into the mix -- usually salt is mixed with caramel -- but it worked here.  Just make sure you drink water instead of caffeine beforehand.