Scanning over the flavors in Blue Bell's August rotation, I was impressed by the plethora of tasty offerings. But I faced a problem: Almost all of them are familiar to me, I've had them many times, so was disappointed in the lack of truly new flavors. Then I noticed White Chocolate Almond at the bottom of the list. While not a new flavor to Blue Bell's lineup, it is new to me, and the description seemed intriguing. Blue Bell characterizes it as a creamy vanilla ice cream with chunks of white chocolate and roasted chopped almonds. That all sounds good to me, so i invested in a tub with pretty high expectations.
Pulling off the lid, the sight I was greeted with was mostly white. A smooth sheen of vanilla ice cream with nary a feature about it. As a lover of lots and lots of stuff in my ice cream, this was not a promising way to start. Fortunately, as my spoon dug below the surface, fears of a less than generous supply of mix-ins were removed. This ice cream does not have a problem with quantity: The chopped roasted almonds and the chunks of white chocolate are both amply provided top to bottom. Unfortunately, where this flavor comes up short is in taste. None of the ingredients taste particularly good! The roasted walnut pieces are crunchy but almost flavorless. The white chocolate pieces are not 'chunks', rather they are more like slivers. Granted, as the picture shoes, they are large slivers, long and wide. But they lack depth, and this seems to sap their flavor. These white chocolate pieces taste like one is chewing wax. Most surprising is the vanilla base. I figured going in that a grade of B was assured because even if the mix-ins disappointed, Blue Bell's consistently excellent vanilla base would compensate. But not so here. If anything, the blandness of the mix-ins saps the creaminess and flavor of the vanilla base.
Overall, I cannot recommend White Chocolate Almond. The mix-ins are flavorless and the concoction has reverse-synergy: the whole is even less than the sum of the underwhelming parts. Being a completest, I stuck with this flavor to the end, but from the quarter-way mark on down I was thinking about how the 3,010 calories could have been much more enjoyably spent on any number of other flavors.
Where Steve Found It: Target
Steve's Grade: C