Ample Hills - Peppermint Pattie

Peppermint Pattie - Peppermint Ice Cream with Dark Chocolate Covered Peppermint Patties

The Ice Cream Reviews are on a road trip!  I am visiting my sister in New York City and I thought I would look for brands here that I have not seen in Southern California.  Multiple folks have recommended the Ample Hills brand so I am giving it a try.   Ample Hills was founded in Brooklyn in 2011 by the husband and wife team of Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna.  The name comes from a line describing Brooklyn in the fifth stanza of the Walt Whitman poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry".  They are a typical artisanal creamery focused on using natural ingredients in creative combinations.  Last year, they got a sizeable influx of investment capital which they have used to build a factory which will make it easier to distribute pints of Ample Hills across the country so if you don't have access to this brand yet, then perhaps it will be coming soon.

For the first pint, I decided on the Peppermint Pattie flavor.  As has been mentioned before, Mint Chip is my favorite flavors so I often use it as a test of a new brand.  Here, Ample Hills has done a bit of a variation on the classic Mint Chip in that they use a "York"-like peppermint pattie as the primary mix-in.  This is an intriguing twist which I am eager to try out.  I also note that the side of the pint contains the words "Frozen Custard" instead of "Ice Cream".  A FAQ on their website answers that curiosity.  I guess this is an FDA labeling requirement due to the amount of egg yolks used in their recipe.

Removing the lid shows the light color of the peppermint base but a very large amount of chocolate mix-ins which give it an almost cookies-and-cream like appearance.  The first spoonful has a lot of mint flavor in the base with small, soft chocolate pieces complementing it -- typical of mint chip.  Then I started encountering the peppermint pattie pieces.  These pieces were quite sizeable and provided a very strong infusion of chewy mint flavoring.  The patties here appeared to be specially designed for their purpose as an ice cream mix-in -- they were thicker and more cube-shaped than a York peppermint pattie.  All of these chewy mint patties resulted in a sweeter than usual pint -- something I noticed more after I had finished eating -- but that did not bother me.

I really enjoyed this pint.  This was a fun twist on the classic mint chip flavor.  Usually the twist is to provide the chocolate in a different way, perhaps by brownies or cookies, but here they've found a way to inject a different type of mint into the mix.   It was a lot of fun.