Cookie dough: a classic American ice cream flavor that pretty much everyone enjoys. Pair this popular concept with the premium ice cream quality and skill of Graeter's, and few will be able to resist—especially me. To be honest, this is my second encounter with this flavor, and I enjoyed it so much, I simply had to revisit it and write up a review.
At 310 calories per serving, this dessert is calorically on par with its peers, and is definitely slightly above the calorie average of most frozen desserts. Still, though, purchasing anything from the Graeter's brand and you should expect high calories—and high satisfaction. Lifting the lid of this pint was a bit of a shocker. Ice everywhere. This was a first for me with Graeter, and it has happened at least once to me with virtually every brand. That said, the freeze-thaw damage was minimal: even the first crunchy, icy bite immediately excited my senses, and delivered the extremely rich, creamy Graeter vanilla base. Only the top 1/4cm to 1/2cm was somewhat icy, and the remainder of the pint was perfect absolutely perfect Graeter’s vanilla ice cream: extremely dense, absurdly creamy, and perfectly sweet.
The solid chocolate chunks are as rich, dark, soft and massive as ever. If you haven’t experienced any of Graeter’s solid chocolate infused desserts, you are absolutely missing out. This chocolate perfects the marriage of milk to dark chocolate: it contains rich dark chocolate notes, with the creaminess of premium milk chocolate. Further, when frozen, it isn’t brittle and hard; instead, it’s malleable, soft, and easily melts in your mouth. In addition, the chunks can be as small as a dime, and as large as a golf ball; in this pint, the largest I found measured around 1x2’’. Not bad at all. No other brand comes close to the solid chocolate chunks of Graeter's.
The cookie dough in this pint is quite good. The chunks are about the size of those in Ben and Jerry’s variant, and are honestly just as enjoyable. I’m not sure why the Ice Cream informant didn’t favor these dough pieces as much as other premium flavors; I found both Graeter's Cookie Dough Chocolate Chip pints to contain soft, smooth, sweet cookie dough that proved equally as enjoyable as all the other big hitters. That said, this pint is not nearly as strong in the cookie dough department as 2nd Street's “Can’t Tell Me No! Cookie Dough”. That said, it certainly makes up for its relative dough weakness with tons of large chocolate chunks.
Where Winston Found It: Kuhn's Market
Grade: A
