Milkjam Creamery - P.I.M.P.

P.I.M.P. - Pecans In Molasses Pumpkin

Today we return to the Milkjam Creamery in Minneapolis for a new flavor for the holiday and winter season called P.I.M.P.  That's a racy sounding flavor name!  Believe it or not, this is not my first pimp-themed ice cream.  On my 'ice cream crawl' of Manhattan Scoop shops a couple of summers ago, I went to Big Gay Ice Cream and had a flavor called Salty Pimp.  For today's pint, P.I.M.P. is an acronym for something fairly benign:  Pecans in Molasses Pumpkin.  I like all of those ingredients, so I am looking forward to checking this out.

Opening the pint, the ice cream looks very chunky!  The pumpkin base is the expected orange but it also looks quite textured.  They have decided to leave it incompletely mixed.  Many pecans are visible right away and molasses is represented by the fact that all of the pecans appear to be coated in brown sugar.  Digging in, the pumpkin flavor is notable right away.  As with most pumpkin flavors, it is really 'pumpkin spice' -- you can tell that there is cinnamon, nutmeg and perhaps a couple of other spices in the mix.  There are a lot more pecans than I expected there to be!  That is always a nice bonus.  All the brown sugar coating the pecans is quite tasty.  It is a bit different than a praline coating, it's more crumbly and more able to stand alone as a mix-in.  As I continued eating the pint, the incomplete mixing of the pint became more evident as I started to see pockets of different colored orange.  There were brighter sections of more pure pumpkin and darker sections which had been affected more by the brown sugar and spices.  It wasn't a large effect -- this was more of an intentional 'marbling' rather than a flaw in the mixing process.  All of the different colored sections were smaller than a spoonful, so it just kept my tastebuds on their toes.

I really enjoyed this pint.  This is a rare and successful case of interesting mix-ins being used in a pumpkin themed pint.  Many pumpkin ice cream implementations just to recreate pumpkin pie or maybe pumpkin cheesecake.  The molasses and brown-sugar coated pecans worked really great here, yet it was still a lot of pumpkin flavor as well.  This is a fun flavor to check out.