Flavor review: Ben&Jerry's Volun-Tiramisu

As is the basis of this blog, I furthered my quest for gourmet ice creams with a recent flavor from Ben&Jerry's, and who better to look with than with two of my best friends. I scour all types and brands of ice cream on my quest, so I often indulge in these pints a few times a week. Actually, it's not really an indulgence since it is such a frequent occurrence.

Volun-Tiramisu - coffee mascarpone ice cream with cocoa dusted coffee rum lady finger pieces.

First let me clarify a few of these scary foreign terms. Tiramisu is an Italian dessert made from lady fingers (light and sweet sponge cake) dunked in coffee, layered with a whipped cream made from egg yolks and mascarpone (an Italian triple-cream cheese), and flavored/dusted with liquor and cocoa. So, from the description it seems Ben and Jerry recreated the dessert exactly, only in ice cream form. Ben&Jerry's teamed up with Target, and released Volun-Tiramisu as a part of a four-flavor line up supporting Volunteerism, hence its name, Volunteerimisu.

This was one of the creamiest flavors I've had by Ben&Jerry's; it resembled Chunky Monkey in texture, very creamy, but a tad foamy, which is something I have not encountered in a B&J flavor thus far. That characteristic is never associated with great ice creams, just those big-5 gallon-plastic-tubs of ice cream, whose brands you don't even recognize, found piled in Wal-Marts. And it should stay there, in its frozen grave until it happens to be picked up by an unfortunately ill-learned couple seeking a frozen treat for the night, thinking they're getting a steal because it is a third of the price of one pint of B&J. As I was saying, it's not a desirable trait to have in your ice cream.

The ice cream base was a mild coffee flavor, much like an iced coffee would taste from Starbucks. It did not resemble their other coffee flavors, Dublin Mudslide and Bonaroo Buzz, which have a coffee density strong enough to keep you up at night. This was a soft coffee flavor, so as not to overtake the flavorful add-ins. The coffee flavor was descaled by the mascarpone. I think the mascarpone was the element that fostered such creaminess, though I could not taste it in particular against the other elements. In an ice cream of my own I would not decrease the coffee flavor. I like the flavor the other two held, but this one tasted "cheap",  even though it provided a subtle background for the lady fingers.

The lady fingers were, in a word, dense. They typified what I think of when I hear sponge cake, though it does not compete with Twinkie-like sponginess. It mimicked the texture of a normal white cake, but resembled the taste of a pound cake. They were coated in cocoa, not only to replicate the actual dessert, but to prevent them from becoming soggy masses suspended in rich ice cream, thus ruining the entire experience, for this is the way with bread-based add-ins. Well thought out B&J team. I liked the lady fingers in the ice cream, though I've had nothing in an ice cream like them before, nor am I a big fan of cake in general, and I could not taste the rum mentioned in the description. These were a new experience, and that is what I am looking for: new things to broaden my frozen horizons, and to find what accents create gourmet ice cream.

I stated that B&J replicated the dessert well, but not the right way. Gourmet ice cream truly replicates a dessert by recreating that dessert in ice cream form, not just throwing bits of the actual dessert into ice cream. Anyone can do that. Want carrot cake ice cream? Throw pieces of carrot cake into vanilla or cinnamon ice cream. Wrong. For Tiramisu, I would have stuck with the coffee ice cream, making it a tad more pungent and combined it with a rich chocolate, but I wouldn't have put any cake pieces in. Instead, I would have made a creamy, breaded swirl out of mascarpone and lady fingers. This would have truly recreated the dessert in frozen form. "Don't get cheap on me, Dodgson."

That's all there is to this one. This flavor was basic compared to most of their wacky concoctions. I will be reviewing more flavors in the future, and giving my $0.02 worth. If you want to know how one tastes before you buy it, then ask me, and if I haven't had it already, then I will buy it, eat it, review it, and then you'll know everything you want to know about it, and probably a little more than you wanted to know.

Ben&Jerry's cow says: "Volunteers rock."

(Yes, I finished it, all 920 calories of it. This is mid-process. Look at the extreme creaminess. This is a characteristic sought far and wide for by many a ice cream maker)

-Reese O'Shirey Esq.

Flavor of the Week: Parent Trap

Each week I will be posting a newly created flavor, or my own version of a traditional favorite. I create, make, and churn all my own ice creams, using nothing but milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and add-ins (i.e. peanut butter).

In producing a flavor, I try to conjure up an original name, a name that will be unique to the flavor, a name that creates a backbone with its meaning or nostalgic history for me.

This week I chose 'Parent Trap'. When I was a child, Disney produced a remake of the '61 classic "Parent Trap," casting Lindsay Lohan, who we have all come to love and admire, and her clone as the twin sisters to play the main role. My siblings and I watched this movie often, but one thing I gleamed from the campy movie changed my life forever. In a scene when the two Lohans are in isolation at camp, they begin eating Oreos. But not just Oreos, mind you; Oreos smeared with peanut butter. I had never thought of this before; it wrought a connection, a fusion of two worlds of tasty desserts of which I frequently indulged myself. It was a perfect combination.

Over a decade later, it struck me. I had to tape into that etherial combination of chocolate and peanut butter. And in doing so, I berthed one of the greatest ice creams to date. As you might be able to deduce, my 'Parent Trap' contains peanut butter and Oreos, but it is far more than that. In the thought process of such a creation, I mused over possibilities and flavor combinations. But it proved simple: the chocolate and peanut butter must be of equal value; one must not have residency or supremacy over the other. And this is where many of the art go awry: they allow one flavor to control too much of the overall flavor. I say "nay". Thus, I decided upon it: rich chocolate ice cream ribboned with smooth, creamy peanut butter, and layered with crunchy, chocolatey Oreo cookies.

I have never been one to praise chocolate ice creams. That is because all I have ever had are the the store bought brands that use cheap chocolate that has no depth or balance in their ice creams. In creating my chocolate base, I first create my own chocolate, molten and decadent, by combining cream with a blend of Dutch cocoa and mildly dark chocolate. This chocolate blend is then added to a personally pasteurized mixture of milk, sugar, and eggs. And viola! A balanced, blended chocolate base unlike any found in stores or local ice cream shops (Coldstone? My take on that shop in the near future) creates the canvas to which I can perfectly paint peanut butter pathways.

Peanut butter, for me, is a way of life. It is more than a food, or an item spread over bread. It is a daily, if not meal-y, consumption. Therefore, I go to great lengths to master its presence in ice cream. After I whip up a bowl of my sweetened peanut butter, I liberally layer it in the chocolate base, and it then becomes a frozen river of salt renting its way through a land of sweetened creation. And that's what it is all about. The coexistence, the rivalry, the harmony of salty and sweet. And as I alluded to earlier, I make them equals, so that neither has triumph, nor is shadowed. In my ice cream you will find in each bite the mirthful presence of sweetened chocolate yet simultaneously be pricked by its salted rival, peanut butter.    

Last of all is the special guest referee: Oreo cookie. Instead of chopping up Oreos wholly, I carefully remove the cream (because it is just puffed sugar and doesn't do well or taste good in ice cream), and only use the dark chocolate cookie sides. With these I create a crust, a layer, a gravel road that paves its way over the vast lands of chocolate, and bridges the breadth of the rivers of peanut butter. It adds that oh-so-desired "crunch", the likes of which can not be mimicked or faked. A crunch in ice cream adds another dimension, by detouring from the prevalent creaminess, that enhances the already enjoyable experience.

The first time I made a batch of this it proved to be the best to date, and promised to become a future classic. This was three months ago (March). In April, I walked into Target, and my legs, as if by their own volition, made a direct course for the freezer section. It is a habit I have. Whenever I go into a store or shop that carries frozen goods, I always check their ice cream selection even if I've been in there and checked it countless times (as in the case with this Target). But that day I found something new. Ben&Jerry's had just released four flavors as apart of their aid of Japan relief efforts and support of volunteerism. But one flavor struck me: "Peanut Butter World". I read the description: Milk Chocolate Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Swirls and Chocolate Cookie Swirls. Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought the same thing. Cursing my misfortune of Ben and Jerry hitting main stream with the flavor first, I purchased one. The name is something of a clever pun though. Here, the word 'Butter' is in place of the word 'Better', leading to the phrase "(peanut)Better World" achieved through volunteerism. Nevertheless, it was a good flavor, one of their better ones (I won't do a review of it in this present blog, but I might in the future), and an exact replica of the one I had churned out a month prior. Oh well, thus are the plagues of us smaller-batch makers. I must press on.

If you would like to see more pictures of the ice cream and flavors I create, then here have a look. It's just something I've put together for my experiments. The extra I put into pints for some friends.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments. Thanks for reading.