Cheesecake Factory - Cookies & Cream

Cookies & Cream - Premium Cookies & Cream Cheesecake Ice Cream with a Signature Cream Cheese Blend, Sour Cream and Chocolate Cookie Swirls

 

Today's flavor comes from the Cheesecake Factory At Home brand.  It is their implementation of Cookies & Cream.  Just about every brand implements a cookies & cream flavor.  I have had pints from Sebastian Joe's, Jeni's, Graeter's, Coolhaus, Ben & Jerry's (limited batch), Sweet Science, Izzy's, Häagen-Dazs, and McConnell's.  That's just the most straightforward implementations that I could find.  Milkjam has a very good one which includes pieces of Peanut Butter.  Izzy's has a current pint which includes a caramel swirl.  There are a lot of other variants which include chocolate bases or coffee bases, or they use chocolate-chip cookies instead of Oreo-style sandwich cookies.  I could go on.  Today's pint looks fairly straightforward with the exception of the use of a thicker cheesecake base.  Let's see how it tastes.

Removing the lid, there are pockets of air around the rim again.  I have seen this from Cheesecake Factory before.  It is possible that it doesn't affect the amount of ice cream that I get, but it always makes me feel like I am missing out of an ounce.  The base ice cream itself is very white with lots of speck-sized cookie crumbs immersed in it.  Some larger cookie pieces are visible as well.  The white base tells me that the chocolate from the crumbs has not bled into the base -- no 'cookie milk' in this pint.  Digging in, the cheesecake base is thick.  I do not taste the distinctive sour cream and cream cheese blend that I taste in their Original flavor, but it serves as a good vehicle for all the cookie mix-ins.  The cookie pieces are not specifically Oreo's but they quite Oreo-like.  As I dig down further, I see some bigger cookie pieces in the mix.

This is a good cookies & cream implementation from the Cheesecake Factory.  As mentioned above, there is a lot of competition for this flavor.  My favorite straight rendition is probably Graeter's.  Coolhaus has a cookie milk base.  Locally, Sebastian Joe's is excellent.  But you can't really go wrong with any of them -- including today's flavor.  

This concludes my survey of Cheesecake Factory flavors.  They just have seven flavors so far:  Original, Key Lime, Chocolate, Strawberry, Salted Caramel, Birthday Cake and Cookies & Cream.  My favorites were probably the first two: Original and Key Lime.  I could taste the distinctive sour cream and cream cheese blend in both of those pints.  They made me feel like I was eating a slice of their cheesecake from the restaurant.  That flavor blend seemed to be missing from the rest of their flavors -- or maybe it got overwhelmed by the other ingredients.  The gritty graham cracker swirl present in many of their pints was also excellent.  It was one of the better pie-crust swirls that I have encountered.  The caramel flavor had a nice caramel swirl that I don't see often enough and although the birthday cake flavor doesn't fit their slice-of-cheesecake flavor pattern, it was very well done.