Jeni's - Savannah Buttermint

Savannah Buttermint - Buttermint-inspired Ice Cream with White Chocolate Flecks

Today is the second pint from my recent six-pint shipment from Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream.  This flavor is called Savannah Buttermint.  From the flavor page, we learn the Jeni is not a fan of mint -- *gasp* -- but she knows that many of her customers love mint (me! me! me!).  To resolve this, she often tries to find a unique twist on mint flavors so that it is something that she would love, too.  Here, she models the flavor after buttermint candies -- those soft mints that you'll often find in a dish on the way out of a restaurant.  Why Savannah?  Well, Jeni pictures these has the mints of the ladies of high society and Savannah has one of the oldest cotillion clubs in the nation.  This should be interesting.

The carton itself is beautiful.  It has a lot of soft pastel colors.  Opening the pint, the ice cream is a very light milky yellow color.  With the first scoop, the ice cream does taste exactly like those soft mints!  It's uncanny!  Now, we all might have personal associations with this kind of mint (a certain restaurant, grandma's house, Savannah debutantes, etc) but once you get past those associations, this is indeed pretty good peppermint flavor.  Each spoonful also contains lots of small white chocolate flecks.  These are small and teardrop shaped.  White chocolate never provides much flavor by itself -- at least not for me, but it does have a hard and crunchy texture.  It actually adds to the illusion of eating the buttermint candies because as soft as those are, you do have to bite them to get into them.  I like it.  The texture makes it much more interesting than if the pint was just homogeneous peppermint.

I liked this ice cream quite a bit.  It is basically just peppermint ice cream with some texture from the flecks of white chocolate but it is uncanny how much this specifically tastes like buttermint candies.  So, this is a fun flavor for mint-lovers to try.