Tillamook Creamery - Salted Caramel

Salted Caramel - Caramel Frozen Custard with Salted Caramel Swirls

 

Today's flavor is from Oregon's Tillamook Creamery and it is called Salted Caramel.  I bought it at Kowalski's on Grand in Saint Paul, but Tillamook pints are also sold at Target now.  I had to double-check my archives to see if I had done a salted caramel flavor from Tillamook before.  It turns out that they used to have a Salted Caramel Toffee flavor which had a salted caramel base and a hard layer of toffee across the top.  Today's flavor does not have the toffee layer on top, but instead has swirls of salted caramel.  I think this is probably going to be an improvement as I did not care for how Tillamook did their layering.  Their layers tended to be too hard and tough and it was hard to integrate it into the rest of the pint.  Let's check this out.

Removing the lid, I see the caramel base has a very light color -- and some evidence of the swirls is visible on top.  The swirls are more pronounced down below.  The caramel custard base is mildly flavored but tastes pretty good.  The light color and mild flavor tells me that the base here is serving just as a vehicle for the swirls.  The swirls are thick and syrupy and have a strong caramel flavor with a bit of a kick of salt to them.  They are quite delicious.

This is a very well done implementation of a salted caramel flavor where the flavor is primarily delivered in a swirl instead of the base.  I just had another flavor like this from the Cheesecake Factory brand.  This flavor is simpler in that it is all caramel (no cream cheese or graham cracker).  If you are looking for a solid homogenous caramel base, check out Coolhaus or if you like extra salty then Sweet Science.  For the caramel swirl, today's flavor is one of the better options but I also like Sweet Science.