Grand Ole Creamery - Peppermint Bon Bon

Peppermint Bon Bon - Mint Ice Cream with Rich Chocolate Chunks

When I was twelve years old, our family went on its first plane trip and left the Minnesota/Wisconsin area for the first time.  We went to New Mexico and Colorado to visit my aunt.  When we were in Albuquerque, we saw an ice cream counter at a local supermarket and my mom decided we deserved a treat because it had been in the high-90s every day that we were there.  My little sister ran up to the counter and started screaming "I want Peppermint Bon Bon!  I want Peppermint Bon Bon!"  The ice cream scooper's face turned sheet white because he had no idea what my sister was talking about.  He just sheepishly said, "... uh... we have strawberry?"  My mom calmly leaned over and said "she means 'mint chocolate chip'" and his face lit up and my sister got what she wanted.  That was the first time I learned that Peppermint Bon Bon was not what everyone in the country called that flavor.  But back then that was what the local brands (Kemps & Land O Lakes) called that flavor.  We often had a five-quart pail in our freezer back then.

Anyhow, today's flavor is from the local Grand Ole Creamery of Saint Paul and has that Peppermint Bon Bon name.  I bought it at Kowalski's in Saint Paul.  As I mentioned above, this was always my favorite flavor growing up -- I got a scoop of Mint Chocolate Chip that day in Albuquerque, too! --  so I always look forward to checking out how each brand does it.  Let's check it out.

Popping off the top, I see all mint!  No chocolate is visible on the top of the pint.  It is a green mint, too.  Many brands have gone away from using food coloring in their mint bases -- mint leaves are green but there is not enough green color in the mint leave to turn an ice cream mint by itself so most natural mint bases are white.  Grand Ole Creamery has used food coloring before in their Cookie Monster flavor and they choose to use it here -- perhaps to increase the nostalgia factor.  The light green base here is actually so smooth and bright that my camera had trouble focusing for the first image.  I am just an amateur photographer and I leave autofocus on.   That's OK almost all of the time, but super-smooth, single-color glossy surfaces can confuse the camera.  Once I dig in, the texture of the ice cream is visible and the focus works again.  The peppermint base is decent and pleasant and not too intense, but it takes a while before I see any chocolate.  Then I see why.  The chunks of chocolate are fairly large -- perhaps sugar cube-sized.  Each chunk is a bit chewy and delivers quite a bit of chocolate flavor when you bite into it.  Eating my way down, I enjoy the texture of the ice cream.  Grand Ole Creamery bases stay firm in the container -- they are not soft serve, but they do melt in your mouth into a cream a little more than other brands.  It is a nice effect.

This is a decent implementation of a mint chocolate chip ice cream from the Grand Ole Creamery.  It has a unique way of mixing the mint and chocolate.  Instead of blending the chocolate into every spoonful, there are large sections of the pint which are mint-only and then some nice large chunks of chocolate once in a while.  I think I would have preferred some smaller chips in the mix along with the bigger chunks (Graeter's does this mix quite well) but I do appreciate the variation from the norm.