McConnell's - Blood Orange

Blood Orange - The distinct, crimson tone and intense, orange-meets-berry flavors of Moro blood oranges, infused into our sweet cream ice cream. A McC’s Blood Orangesicle.

I've been reviewing a lot of local brands of late.  Most of the popular national brands have not released their new flavors for 2019 yet.  So, I looked around to see if there was anything that I could order by mail.  Sure enough, the Santa Barbara-based McConnell's Ice Cream has a winter collection!  So, I ordered that and it came the other day.  It was shipped from North Carolina, which tells me that McConnell's is becoming more and more of a national brand -- even if it is not available in my specific area quite yet.  The winter collection contains some cool fruit-based flavors.  As cold as it is in the Midwest this time of year, this is when many citrus fruits are in season.  The first flavor is called Blood Orange.  I have reviewed one other blood-orange-based pint before from Sweet Science.  It should be fun to see how McConnell's implements this.

Opening the pint, the ice cream is a bright coral pink color.  The Sweet Science implementation used a swirl.  This has has blended it into a homogeneous pint.  Digging in, the ice cream is very dense (very low air content) and quite creamy.  A few McConnell's pints I had a couple of years ago would be very hard and almost icy, but that is not an issue here.  This is soft and dense ice cream.  The blood orange flavor is quite good.  Good blood orange flavor, great texture, this is delicious stuff.

As you can see, I really enjoyed this pint of ice cream.  I am a huge fan of citrus flavors which can sometimes be a challenge due to the fact that their acidity sometimes does not play well with milk and cream.  That's not an issue here one bit.  I don't know how they did it, but I like it!  I liked this pint a bit better than Sweet Science, but I do acknowledge that the implementations are quite different.  Sweet Science used a vanilla base with a blood orange swirl, so it had a big creamsicle vibe to it.  McConnell's has the same flavors but all blended up and homogenized.  Anyhow, blood orange fans -- or fans of any orange or citrus -- will love this.