For the month of June, I gave myself the silly challenge of doing a Baskin Robbins: eating 31 flavors of ice cream. To count, I had to eat at least three spoonfuls of the flavor. I couldn’t cheat by standing at a counter in an ice cream shop and ask for a taste test. Plus, the person behind the counter would get annoyed. They get annoyed if you ask for two taste tests.
I learned quite a bit in my pursuit of testing my tastes in ice cream. Ben and Jerry’s, on the whole, sits heavily in stomach. Häagen-Dazs slides smoothly across the taste buds. Perhaps it’s the bias of my Texas childhood, but Blue Bell brings about a comforting feeling with a spoonful. Flavors of ice cream have gone corporate sponsored, combining other popular products or even famous brand names. Oreos, Butterfingers, Stephen Colbert, Starbucks. Jumping food mediums seems to be the norm, causing an exponential assortment of choices in a frozen food aisle. Also, conveniently, where the pint used to be the guilty pleasure size for all midnight snack runs, serving containers can be carried away by the armful at three ounces. A pint of ice cream in a Texas summer inside a car can increase unsafe driving speeds.
Godspeed, I ate ice cream for all three meals one day. I threw a mini ice cream party for snack day at work. The sales clerks at various Walgreens knew me as I rolled in, heading towards the frozen food section. I could have continued this dessert trip for a long time, perhaps six months or more with all the unique flavors of ice cream, and that’s not including the overlap of basic chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, etc. flavors or the assorted vanilla flavors that Blue Bell alone sells. And, potentially, with the advent of Coldstone or Marble Slab, where you can add mix-ins, you can up your flavor count considerably with the permutations and combinations of Heath crunch and a dozen flavors.
Stats:
- 7 Ben and Jerry’s
- 8 Blue Bell
- 1 Braums
- 2 Coldstone
- 1 Dryers
- 5 Haagen Dazs
- 1 Marble Slab
- 1 Starbucks
- 1 purchased at Trader Joes
- 4 from restaurants
The full list is below, and I made note if there was anything interesting related to it, be it by flavor or experiential.
- Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia: overrated, flavors too subtle.
- Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie
- Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup: like a lead weight in my stomach.
- Ben and Jerry’s Stephen Colbert Americone Crunch
- Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough: the flavor to kick off the month.
- Ben and Jerry’s Envision World Peace
- Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey: Surprisingly good.
- Blue Bell Cookies and Cream.
- Blue Bell Red Velvet: Surprisingly good; enjoyed outside while 4 Fort Worth PD officers arrested someone across the street from Sweet Sammie’s.
- Blue Bell Dutch Chocolate: Mini ice cream party flavor number one.
- Blue Bell Cotton Candy: frozen torture that didn’t even taste like cotton candy.
- Blue Bell Crazy Cookie Dough
- Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla: Mini ice cream party flavor number two.
- Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip: a classic.
- Blue Bell Moo-lineum Crunch: interesting mix of flavor.
- Blue Sushi Green Tea: heavy on the green tea; I’ve had better.
- Blue Sushi Raspberry Vanilla
- Braums Peppermint Ice Cream: for a birthday.
- Coldstone Pine-berry: like a gelato; ate in the company of a 31 year old and a 3 year old.
- Coldstone Cheesecake: definitely needed a mix in, which I did not do.
- Dryers Butterfinger
- Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche: delightful; Walgreen’s sales clerk was impressed I knew how to pronounce it.
- Haagen Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip
- Haagen Dazs Butter Pecan
- Haagen Dazs Rum Raisin: I’m not a rum fan, so why I picked this horrible choice is beyond me. Pirate, maybe?
- Haagen Dazs Blueberry Crunch: Amazing.
- Lanny’s Brown Butter: eaten in the company of an engagement celebration and a graduation celebration; also, the last flavor for the month.
- Marble Slab Coffee
- Shinjuku Station Red Bean: I love Shinjuku Station. Enjoyed with a swizzle stick and Yamazaki whisky.
- Starbucks Java Chip Chiller
- Strawberry mochi: a Japanese style of ice cream I picked up from my first trek to Trader Joe’s.