Izzy's - Caramel Cookie Crunch

Caramel Cookie Crunch - Sweet Cream with Chocolate Sandwich Cookies and a Caramel Swirl

 

Izzy's Ice Cream has a new flavor!  Caramel Cookie Crunch.  I found it at Widmer's market on St Clair & Prior, but I have since seen it at several Lund's markets in the city.  They also carry them at Hyvee and Kowalski's.  If you've been following the ice cream scene in the Twin Cities area, you'll know that one of the big stories of the pandemic is Izzy's Ice Cream closing both of its scoop shops and focusing on factory-made pints for sale in grocery stores.  Back in December of 2019 (just a few months before the pandemic hit), the founders of Izzy's were featured in a local business podcast called By All Means (link here) where they discussed their goals of increasing their grocery store pint business.  It is interesting how the pandemic greatly accelerated their time scale.  I am a bit bummed that their scoop shops are no longer around because they had a much wider selection available there.  They are down to about a dozen flavors now.  That's just the selfish ice cream lover in me talking though.  I understand the business reasons why they did this.

This new flavor is called Caramel Cookie Crunch.  It is a cookies and cream ice cream with a caramel swirl.  It looks like a re-imagining of one of their old scoop shop flavors called Caramelia Cookie Crunch which I reviewed a couple of years ago.  I debated whether or not I needed to write a new review, but decided that it would be fun to write about Izzy's again.  Let's check it out!

Removing the lid, I see a light colored base with the finely specked cookie crumbs immersed in them -- typical of cookies and cream implementations.  Plus, I see a beautiful single swirl of caramel across the top.  Digging in, the base tastes like a good version of a cookies and cream flavor.  I can taste the sweet milky flavor of the ice cream more than the average rendition. Some versions steep the cookies in the milk for a long time before churning creating a 'cookie milk' flavor.  Here, it is a brighter sweet cream base.  The cookie crumbs are of two different sizes.  There are the fine crumbs which are blended fully into the base and then there are these large chunks which are dispersed randomly throughout like mix-ins.  Back in the scoop shop, they used Oreo brand cookies, but now that it's packaged in stores they use their own imitation chocolate sandwich cookie.  This cookies are good, deliver a lot of chocolate flavor, but you can tell they are not Oreos.  The chocolate that Oreo uses has a very distinctive flavor.  Then, the salted caramel swirl is quite delicious.  I taste it right away on the top of the pint.  The swirl does disappear from time to time -- I was not able to get the caramel on every spoonful -- but it is quite potent and delicious when I do encounter it.  I do not know if this was intentional to keep the caramel from overwhelming the pint or a mixing issue when the swirl was added.

This is a delicious new cookies and cream flavor from Izzy's.  Compared to their old scoop shop flavor, this flavor has a brighter milky flavor in the ice cream and a bit less caramel.  The caramel flavor is still very delicious at the lower levels, though.  Think of it as cookies and cream with a caramel twist instead giving caramel the top billing.  I will continue to follow Izzy's and see if they have any plans on adding more flavors.