Ben & Jerry's - Pumpkin Cheesecake

Pumpkin Cheesecake - Pumpkin Cheesecake Ice Cream with a Graham Cracker Swirl

The first day of fall was this week, so seasonal foods featuring pumpkin are starting to pop up.  There are lattes at Starbucks, muffins at the Breadsmith and ice cream at your local supermarket.  Ben & Jerry's has featured it's pumpkin cheesecake flavor every fall since 2007.

Opening the lid, you see the beige color of the pumpkin base along with a darker tan of the graham cracker swirl evident on the very top.  Digging in, you taste a relatively strong pumpkin flavor.  It tasted a lot like pumpkin pie.  The graham cracker swirl sealed it because that tasted like a bit of the crust was swirled into the ice cream.  It did not pack the spicy punch that Aunt Betty's famous mystery bread has, but checking the ingredients I did see cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves listed, but often pumpkin pie is not too spicy either. (Editorial note:  Aunt Betty uses allspice instead of ginger and she asks for just as much cloves as cinnamon so her bread has got quite a kick).  The fact that this was a cheesecake flavor was not all that noticeable.  Perhaps early in the flavor testing process at the Ben & Jerry Laboratories, they found that pure pumpkin ice cream was too much and needed cutting.  Who knows?

I did enjoy this flavor, but I do like pumpkin pie and as we are running out of flavors to review I was eager to jump on a new flavor to review.  So, if you like pumpkin in the fall then give this flavor a try.  It will likely only be on shelves for a couple of months.

Ben & Jerry's - Pistachio Pistachio

Pistachio Pistachio - Pistachio Ice Cream with Lightly Roasted Pistachios

There's nothing fancy here.  Introduced way back in 1988, this is Ben & Jerry's Pistachio Ice Cream with the added bonus of having pistachios as the fill-in.   

The pistachio is a member of the cashew family.  It is native to the eastern Mediterranean and have been known since biblical times, indeed mentioned in the book of Genesis (43:11).  Pistachios are soft nuts and thus are not usually included in mixes of nuts, but they have proven to be quite popular in desserts.  They are a key ingredient in many baklava recipes, it is a common flavor of spumoni and it is popular ice cream flavor.  The original three flavors of Neapolitan Ice Cream were pistachio, vanilla and cherry to match the colors of the Italian Flag.

I very much enjoyed the ice cream itself.  Its been hot and muggy here in San Diego in late August and early September.  Its the one part of the year where I miss not having air conditioning.  This flavor hit the spot as it is very cool and smooth.    This flavor is a bit of an outlier in the Ben & Jerry's line.  It doesn't have anything but pistachio in it and its the only flavor with any pistachio.  If you're in the mood for the green cream, this is a good implementation of it.

Ben & Jerry's - Coffee Toffee Bar Crunch

Coffee Toffee Bar Crunch - Coffee Ice Cream with Fudge-Covered Toffee Pieces

Today we review the second Toffee Bar Crunch flavor - Coffee Toffee Bar Crunch.  Its is actually the original toffee bar flavor introduced back in 1986 -- the vanilla flavor was just introduced in 2012.  I have reviewed them out of order here.  The flavor name did not always rhyme.  It was called Coffee Heath Bar Crunch for many years, but in 2014 they removed the Heath Bar brand name as part of a push to remove GMO's (genetically-modified organisms) from Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Opening the pint, I see the dark tan color of the coffee base.  There's a little bit of frost on the top.  It has been uncharacteristically humid here of late which may explain that.  There was also a small air pocket which is rare for Ben & Jerry's (I've seen it with other brands) but it is very small and appears to be an anomaly  Eating into the pint, the coffee base is quite noticeable but not too strong.  The toffee bar pieces are very large.  Larger than I remember them being in the vanilla version of the flavor.  I had trouble fitting some of them on the spoon to take the photos.  The toffee bars were quite good though.  Crunchy, but brittle enough not to be jawbreaking.  The coffee and the toffee go well together.  Looking online, I see that toffee-flavoring is not an uncommon coffee flavoring so I guess that makes sense.

I did enjoy this flavor.  It's a bit of a niche flavor in that there are a number of people who don't like coffee and a number of people who don't like toffee, but if you are a nut for coffee and a nut for toffee -- or you just like things that rhyme -- then this is the flavor for you.

Ben & Jerry's - Strawberry Cheesecake

Strawberry Cheesecake - Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream with Strawberries & a Thick Graham Cracker Swirl

The Strawberry Cheesecake flavor was introduced by Ben & Jerry's in 2005.  Many of the recent reviews have focused on chocolate & peanut butter, but this contains neither.  Its a slice of strawberry cheesecake in ice cream format.  The graham cracker swirl even simulates the cheesecake's crust. 

Opening the pint, I see the light pink color of the strawberry cheesecake ice cream with small views of the strawberry pieces and the graham cracker swirls below.  I was curious about the strawberry cheesecake ice cream base.   Cheesecake is already a thick and heavy dairy dessert and they're going to make ice cream out of it?  Well, it still tasted like ice cream and not cheesecake. Checking the side of the pint, there is indeed cream cheese on the ingredient list but what it does here is soften the strawberry flavor.  Strawberry can be a very strong and sweet flavor that it can be too much.  I've seen some places cut it with sour cream but here the cream cheese has that same effect.  It's not that heavy of a base either.  Cheesecake by its nature is super rich and filling, but checking the side of the pint, this pint was "only" 260 calories per four oz serving which is about average by Ben & Jerry's standards.  The chocolate and peanut butter flavors are often 20% more.

The strawberry pieces are lightly dispersed through the pint and give that occasional unmuted punch of strong strawberry flavor.  As I've mentioned in previous reviews, frozen strawberry pieces are very unpleasant to bite into, but this pint contains nothing that is crunchy so I was able to eat the whole pint without using my teeth.  With that strategy in place, the strawberry pieces were quite delicious.  I was expecting a little bit more of the graham cracker swirl, but when I did encounter it, it was a tasty compliment to the cheesecake ice cream base. 

I enjoyed this pint.  Its a rare flavor that contains neither chocolate nor peanut butter so the flavor can be a nice break from those common ingredients.  And of course, if you like strawberries, this flavor is a must try for you.

Ben & Jerry's - New York Super Fudge Chunk

New York Super Fudge Chunk - Chocolate Ice Cream with White & Dark Fudge Chunks, Pecans, Walnuts & Fudge-Covered Almonds

The New York Super Fudge Chunk flavor is one of the oldest flavors in the Ben & Jerry's line of pints.  The story behind the flavor's creation is quite interesting.  Back in 1983, Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield were just starting to explore expansion outside of the northwestern Vermont market -- which they thought they had covered pretty well.  So they decided to make their pints available at Dmitri's Cafe at 156 Spring Street in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.  They had good word of mouth backing so the famed food critic Gael Greene went to try it out and published the following review in the New Yorker magazine that fall (scroll down about six paragraphs for the section on Ben & Jerry's)

http://www.insatiable-critic.com/Article.aspx?ID=1024&keyword=The%20Ice-Cream%20Renaissance

Needless to say, "pleasant enough, but not thrilling, and the chips and bits seem rather sparse" were not words that Ben and Jerry wanted to hear. They took the review as a challenge.  The response was to add extra chocolate syrup to the ice cream to strengthen its chocolate flavor and then to load it up with 40% fill-ins than they had ever added before.  The extra fill-ins also made it the most expensive pint they had ever made as well.  The name "New York Super Fudge Chunk" was selected and it was launched with great fanfare.  The flavor was a big success thirty years ago and it still remains a popular flavor today. 

Since we're on the topic of loaded flavors in New York ice cream shops, here is a link to a very recent Wall Street Journal article that my sister sent me about the economics of ice cream flavors:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cold-calculations-of-ice-cream-economics-1438976680

... some of the exotic, tastiest and most desired fill-ins are indeed the most expensive.  So shopkeepers either have to raise their prices or they have to rely on some customer only getting vanilla to subside the more costly flavors.

On to the pint of the day!  Opening the lid, I was surprised to see mainly plain chocolate.  Only a hint of the fill-ins that I had been reading so much about were visible.  Eating into the pint, I encountered the fill-ins fairly quickly.  There were the fudge chips.  White and dark chips -- each rectangular shaped like the chunks of Chunky Monkey.  Then there were the nuts which added extra crunchiness to each spoonful.  At first, I was not as overwhelmed by the density of the fill-ins as I expected to be especially after reading above articles.  I think the "40% more than any other flavor" line is a bit dated -- some of the newer flavors are quite dense.  That said, as I kept eating the pint and the base ice cream got softer as it melted the density of fill-ins seemed to increase as I got to the bottom.  So, by any standard a very stacked pint.  Plus it was very chocolatey!  I ate the entire pint in one sitting and as I write this a half an hour later I am noticing that the surfaces of my eyeballs are drying out from chocolate overload.    I have temporarily switched my beverage of choice from Diet Coke to water in hopes to rebalance my ocular electrolytes.  Its a good feeling though, it is like the chocolate ice cream version of having extra spicy Thai food.

So all in all, a successful pint.  I would rate it as one of the three top chocolate flavors available from Ben & Jerry's.  If you like your chocolate gooey, then you get Phish Food with its marshmallow swirls.  If you like like your chocolate chewy, then you get Chocolate Fudge Brownie with its stays-soft-in-the-freezer Greyston Brownies.  But if you like your chocolate chunky, you get New York Super Fudge Chunk.  Personally, I am a Phish Food guy but variety is the spice of life and I imagine I'll have this one again.

Update:  In the fall of 2018, Ben & Jerry's created a limited batch repackaging of this flavor called called Pecan Resist -- you can even see that the ice cream in the pint images at Pecan Resist and the old flavor are identical, the pint labels are swapped with photoshop.  The new artwork looks really cool, though!  Since this is not a new flavor, I'll just add a note here. 

Ben & Jerry's - Peanut Butter Fudge Core

Peanut Butter Fudge Core - Chocolate & Peanut Butter Ice Creams with Mini Peanut Butter Cups & a Peanut Butter Fudge Core

Peanut Butter Fudge is a standard 'core' flavor from Ben & Jerry's which was introduced with most of the rest of the core flavors in 2014.  As you may recall a 'core' flavor features a solid cylinder of am unswirled goopy fill-in such as caramel, jam, cookie butter, or in this case fudge.  Here the core is listed as 'peanut butter fudge' so it will be interesting to see what exactly that is.  I wonder if they do the core flavors at the scoop shops.

The top of the pint looks a lot like the other core flavors.  The two ice creams are on opposite sides and the fudge core is visible right away.  Digging in, the peanut butter base is a little bit nutty, but not overpowering.  The chocolate on the other side was the standard chocolate.  The mini peanut butter cups were mainly on the peanut butter side.  When the cups are that small, the chocolate coating makes up a larger percentage of the nugget but you still got a burst of peanut butter flavor as you bit into one.  The peanut butter fudge core tasted mostly like fudge.  Its possible there was a hint of peanut butter in there, but chocolate was by far the dominant flavor.  It did have a thicker and slightly doughy consistency to it which was in contrast to the hazelnut core which had sort of a thick syrup consistency but flavor-wise it was basically chocolate.  The core of fudge was still tasty.  I did my standard eat-around-the-core method where I tried to get a bit of the core into each spoonful, but because of this, chocolate was far and away the dominant flavor of the pint.

Overall, it was a satisfying pint, but peanut butter lovers may be slightly disappointed that peanut butter plays a supporting role.  The name of the flavor is a bit misleading.  Amongst all of the chocolate and peanut butter permutations, this one is probably three parts chocolate and one part peanut butter.

Ben & Jerry's - Coffee, Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz!

Coffee, Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz! - Coffee Ice Cream with Espresso Bean Fudge Chunks

The Coffee, Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz! flavor in has been a favorite of coffee lovers for almost twenty years.  Originally a mistake in a scoop shop where too much coffee flavoring was added accidently to a batch, the result turned out to be successful and it was promoted to a full-time flavor in 1996.  The repeated coffee's and buzz's in the flavor name appropriately warn of the extra strong coffee flavor.

I had a bad experience with this flavor last year.  The coffee flavoring ended up being too powerful and gave me a headache.  That is funny because people know me as a caffeine addict but my vehicle for the drug is Diet Coke which has about a third of the caffeine content of a cup of coffee.  I drink Diet Coke because I'm not a fan of hot liquids (I don't drink hot chocolate or even eat soup for similar reasons).  The few times I have tried iced coffee to get my caffeine more efficiently and without artificial sweeteners has produced similar headaches.  I have more appreciation for people that drink three cups of coffee every morning after these experiments.

It is with these reservations that I open this pint.  The coffee ice cream base has a dark beige or light brown color and a couple of the espresso bean fudge chunks is visible on the very top.  Eating into the pint, the coffee flavoring is indeed stronger than normal.  As mentioned in previous reviews, chocolate makes an excellent complement to coffee partly because its similar effects.  The active ingredient in chocolate (theobromine) and the active ingredient in coffee (caffeine) differ only by a single methyl group.  Here, the fudge chunks are mostly the rectangular chips which are used in other flavors.  I did not specifically notice the extra espresso bean flavoring in these chunks but every spoonful had so much coffee flavoring that I could have lost track of which coffee flavoring came from where.

I did make it through the entire pint without getting a headache, although I had mentally prepared myself and I had abstained from caffeine for a few hours beforehand.  It was tasty -- coffee and chocolate is a winning combination -- though perhaps on the strong side.  I felt like I was eating it on a dare.  But, if you a serious coffee drinker who enjoys loading up with 3-4 cups of strong coffee each morning, then this may the ice cream for you.  For the rest of us, I would recommend the previously-reviewed Target-exclusive "Brewed to Matter" flavor which delivers its coffee and chocolate flavors in more reasonable doses.