Ben & Jerry's Choc Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream : Read reviews and compare prices at Ciao.co.uk

Author's product rating:

Value for Money	Good
Product Quality	Excellent
Product package	Poor
Taste	Delicious
How loyal are you to this brand?	Quite

Advantages:	Tastes nice
Disadvantages:	Packaging

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Ben and Jerry's are having a 'Free Cone Day' today (Tuesday 25th April), but this year the Manchester outlets aren't included. To make up for the disappointment, I treated myself to some anyway, just having to pay money for it instead.

Cookie Dough is one of my favourite sweet snack foods. When I bake cookies myself I have a tendency to eat half the dough when it's still raw. In America you can now actually buy pre-mixed cookie dough specifically designed to be eaten as it is, not baked. Yum. Unfortunately this ice cream is not 100% cookie dough, but it's still good.

Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough Ice Cream has 3 main parts:

- Vanilla ice cream which tastes silky and pure, and has a good, strong vanilla bean flavour, not at all artificial like cheaper brands tend to be. The biggest part of this product is the vanilla ice cream, but though some people find this a boring flavour, I think it is complemented well by the other ingredients.

- Cookie dough chunks which are generous in size and in quantity. They are solid and chewy, especially when coming straight from the freezer, and sometimes seem to have a vague peanutty taste. The cookie dough is not especially smooth once it has been frozen and only slightly defrosted, but the lumps are small so do not detract from the overall experience.

- Chocolate chips which are usually attached to the cookie dough (though sometimes break free) and which are small but plentiful. These are chipped from dark chocolate so have a slightly bitter taste, but are delicious when combined with the slightly salty dough.

I like the ice cream because of the mix of flavours (a bit sweet, a bit salty, a bit bitter), but also because of the range of textures. The ice cream is smooth, the chocolate chips solid and the cookie dough chewy. This makes it an ice cream that you have to bite into a little bit, rather than slurp away at, but also means I feel fuller afterwards because my body has registered that I've been eating something.

The look of the ice cream is less interesting - the vanilla ice cream is a rich, creamy yellow colour, but the chocolate chips look dull, and the cookie dough often has a gray tinge to it. In other words, it's not the most appealing ice cream to look at, but it does taste good. The guy who ran the Lindt chocolate appreciation evening I attended in Sydney claimed that good quality chocolate is shiny and glossy, and that only badly tempered chocolate has a dull surface. Therefore, you could assume that the chocolate they use for this ice cream isn't top notch - but then should it really be? I think it might be a waste to use the best stuff in such small quantities, mixed into a frozen product that is predominately flavoured by other ingredients. The chocolate used here looks and tastes chocolatey, which is all you can really ask for in this sort of item.

The Ben and Jerry's range, now owned by Unilever, has recently launched a new pot size (150ml) and are trialling it on just a few flavours. One of these is Cookie Dough which I think is a reflection of its popularity. It's a nice ice cream because it has an interesting flavour, and because it doesn't need an additional sauce or topping to make it special. In fact, the hot fudge, cream and sprinkles you get when you go to one of their scoop shops takes the flavour a bit over the top for me, making it sickly. It's therefore an easy flavour to have in the house, because it's all you need for a tasty, no-nonsense dish of ice cream.

My only real complaint, applying to all flavours in the range, concerns the tubs the ice cream comes in. These are papery and, at times, flimsy. The 500ml size is fine, because you generally scoop some ice cream out of it into a bowl (unless you're being very greedy). The smallest tubs - the 100ml ones - are also fine because they are designed to be eaten out of (with a tiny plastic spoon, no less) and so appear to be a bit sturdier. The problem lies with the new size, which at 150ml is still only a single serving. Because of this fact I attempted to eat straight from the tub, but it wasn't easy. The paper outer coating was quite easy to crush, especially when digging hard into ice cream that was still a bit frozen. It also didn't allow the ice cream to defrost evenly at the same time, meaning I had to eat round in circles, working my way in from the edge, to ensure I only ate bits once they were sufficiently defrosted. Because of the way their manufacturing plant works, the majority of chunks do seem to end up not being in the outer 1cm of the tub, which is much more noticeable in a tub of this size. I ended up eating a lot of vanilla-heavy, cookie dough-light ice cream, followed by a lot of dough-rich, vanilla-light mouthfuls. Another problem with the smaller tubs is the way they ice up if not stored properly. This is something you cannot tell until you open the tub, by which point I can't often be bothered to return to the shop. With bigger tubs this is less of a problem as the top layer is a much smaller percentage of the total product, and so you don't mind so much scraping it off, or mixing in the icicles.

Ben and Jerry's is available in most supermarkets, and branches of Blockbuster video always seem to have an excellent selection. Offers are common - the Londis near me currently has a "2 tubs for £5" deal on, and my medium tubs were "2 for £2.50" at Blockbuster, which is much cheaper than the equivalent amount at a scoop shop. Typically it's an expensive product when not on offer (up to £5 / £6 per large tub in some places) but it tastes so much nicer than cheaper brands that it's worth investing in as a treat, even if that means you end up eating ice cream less often.

http://www.benjerry.co.uk