The latest flavor of Ben and Jerry’s to cross my path in my ongoing crusade was their Chocolate Macadamia.
In a nutshell, the claims to fame for this flavor are its use of fair trade swirled chocolate and vanilla mixed with fudge-covered macadamia nuts. What made me pick it was not either the chocolate or vanilla but rather the fact that, up until now, I’ve never had a macadamia nut.
Really.
(This comes up time and time again on Signs of Sanity, but up until now I’ve had a remarkably limited diet due to medical necessity mixed with a heaping dose of food near-phobia.)
It took a bit longer than normal to get home from Hannaford so the pint was pretty soft by the time I was able to get it into the freezer, but it made for much easier scooping when it came time for dessert that night.
A couple things struck me about Chocolate Macadamia:
Both the chocolate and vanilla ice creams in it had much more muted flavors than the normal Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate or Vanilla. In fact, the Chocolate tasted much more like milk chocolate than the normal rich, cocoa-y standalone Chocolate.
There were far fewer macadamia nuts in the mix than I had been expecting given Ben and Jerry’s normal reputation for clutter in their ice cream.
Whatever taste the macadamia nuts had was pretty overpowered by both the fudge covering and the ice cream itself.
The ice cream’s mouth feel wasn’t nearly as crunchy as you’d expect from a flavor that has a nut in its title. I chalked this up to the macadamias being whole nuts rather than fudge-covered pieces.
The ice cream was as high a quality as you would expect from Ben and Jerry’s, very tasty, and very easy to scoop given the relative lack of chunks.
By and large, I enjoyed Chocolate Macadamia quite a bit and if I was disappointed by anything it was that I still can’t tell you what a macadamia nut tastes like which was one of my goals in picking the flavor.
