By Cat Eldridge: Ice cream. I’d like to say that everyone loves it but I know better. However I do and Our Gracious Host has allowed me to do a taste testing of peanut butter ice creams. Lots of them. No, I didn’t gain weight. In fact, I lost weight during that period. Go figure that.
I ended up with five that I considered worth telling about — Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Cups, Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter, Halo Top Peanut Butter Cup, Hannaford’s peanut cup with PB cup pieces and chocolate chips and Tillamook’s Chocolate Peanut Butter.
I look for a good but not overwhelming peanut butter taste, a really not too sweet aftertaste and a definitely milky feel on the tongue.
Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Cups has been a decades-long favorite of mine. Great peanut butter taste.
Though the picture on the pint shows chopped up peanut butter cups throughout the ice cream, all the pints I’ve had are full or halved pieces in the middle of the pint and no smaller pieces throughout. Points off for this.
Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream is described on their site as “Ridiculously rich chocolate, ridiculously decadent peanut butter, just a bit ridiculous.” Points for using the word ridiculous twice. It gets lots of complaints on its site for having no peanut butter. Which if you’re looking for visible peanut butter, it doesn’t. Unlike most such ice creams, it blends the peanut butter into the product. Does it work? For me, yes as I like it very much as it makes for a product with a distinctive peanut butter taste and a very smooth feel on the tongue. For other others, the lack of visual peanut butter chunks means they think there’s no peanut butter here.
Halo Light Top Peanut Butter Cup. I never even heard of this brand until I was seeking out different ice creams for this taste testing. (Urrrp!) They make a lot, and I do mean a lot of keto offerings, but also some regular dairy as well. This is a chocolate peanut butter ice cream with some bits of peanut butter throughout the ice cream. Now there really isn’t much of a chocolate flavor here as the peanut butter is very overpowering. Definitely not one I’d pick up again as I’d like one where the chocolate was more there. And more dairy as well.
A store brand, Hannaford’s peanut cup with PB cup pieces and chocolate chips, is not one that you’d expect to be great, but you’d wrong in this case. This one actually was the best of these, period. It was sweet but not too sweet, an excellent peanut butter taste to it and used a fantastic chocolate chip and was perfect for eating.
Tillamook Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream is damn fine too. Out of Oregon, a friend in Portland recommended it. It’s got a very nice balance between the chocolate and the peanut butter. Now what’s neat here is that the peanut is distinctly salted, yes salted, which I’ve not seen in any ice cream before. It really makes the ice cream taste different and in a good way.
So do you have a favorite ice cream?
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We make our own Avocado Ice cream. Can make it to our own desires – not too sweet.
My wife Minuk is very partial to peanut butter, but has never come across PB Ice cream here in Oz. She yearns for Black Cherry Ice Cream which she recall from when she lived in New Haven. We can’t find any here.
As for Peanut Butter where you’d not expect to find it, our go to is Bad Shepherd Peanut Butter Porter https://www.badshepherd.com.au/products/peanut-butter-porter
Tillamook makes a damned fine ice cream; discovered it by accident when vacationing years ago in Oregon (just picked up a pint of blueberry ice cream in the local store) and have never been disappointed by it since. I’ve not had their Chocolate Peanut Butter (there’s a VERY limited selection of Tillamook ice cream in my local Chicago shops) but I’ll believe you that it’s excellent.
Oddly the store brand for Mariano (Kroger), “Private Selection”, is also of very high quality. Their “Denali Extreme Maximum Fudge Moose Tracks” (no, really, that’s the name) has firm ribbons of very slightly salty chocolate throughout, and I agree with Cat that the very slight saltiness of those ribbons of chocolate really add to the flavor.
For a long time my favorite ice cream was Mint chocolate chip from Breyers.
Then I went through a Magnum ice cream bar phase.
Various flavors of Ben and Jerry’s have competed for attention.
I discovered Tillamook a couple of years ago and have enjoyed it highly. When I went to Oregon on my 2021 trip, I saw in grocery stores flavors that I can’t get here in Minneapolis…and tried several of them to my delight).
Their Mudslide might be my “available favorite” ice cream at the moment, but on that aforementioned trip, I really liked the Mountain Huckleberry flavor…but that one is not available here.
Straus Family Creamery is an organic dairy that makes ice cream from their own milk and cream. The quality of the ingredients really shines in the ice cream.
I have fond memories of Bott’s Ice Cream in Berkeley, now long gone. Professor Bott quit the University to open an ice cream shop. His signature flavor was CCAC, Cream Caramel Almond Crunch. It was created in honor of the nearby California College of Arts and Crafts.
Not exactly a stfnal topic, but hey! Why not?
My credential needs to gain weight, so I’ve been feeding him lactose-free ice cream among other things. Since I’m not supposed to be eating ice cream I’ve been getting him my least-favorite flavor, Butter Pecan. He enjoys the butter part but I always find a small pile of licked-clean pecan at the bottom of his dish. I’m thinking peanut butter might be a better way to chonk him up.
@Sam Long
You’ve never met the ice-cream socials at conventions!
P J Evans says You’ve never met the ice-cream socials at conventions!
I actually had a few sentences about the fact that ice cream has a long history in fandom by way of those socials but I decided that I let one of y’all bring it up.
Charon Dunn says My credential needs to gain weight, so I’ve been feeding him lactose-free ice cream among other things. Since I’m not supposed to be eating ice cream I’ve been getting him my least-favorite flavor, Butter Pecan. He enjoys the butter part but I always find a small pile of licked-clean pecan at the bottom of his dish. I’m thinking peanut butter might be a better way to chonk him up.
It indeed would be.
Do get the salty version as cats, like all land mammals, crave salt. And of course peanuts are a protein too.
I’m with Cassy. Kroger’s Private Selection Denali Extreme Moose Tracks is what I get in lieu of a birthday cake. The Maximum Fudge version isn’t always available, but I get it when I can.
Tillamook is the BEST. One of the things I regret about moving about from the Pacific Northwest. (And if you are a peanut butter fan, I recommend Skrewball Whiskey, which is peanut butter flavored and a surprisingly fine sip.)