Cookie monsters

Brought to you by Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams

For two siblings who never fought much, my brother and I have had some of our biggest blowouts over ice cream. Specifically the fact that there’s an etiquette involved in sharing it, or there should be, if you aren’t an animal. Growing up nothing would make me madder than opening up a pint of cookie dough and seeing that Nick had tunneled through it already, digging out all the treasures and leaving nothing but boring old vanilla in his wake. Also one time on our annual family beach vacation when we were sharing the banana split we were allowed to have once! a! year!! I called dibs on a big chunk of heath bar on my side of the sundae because I am a “save the best for last” person. Unfortunately, he is a “two marshmallows now person” and those aren’t people who should share food in real time. When I got to the bottom of the bowl I was like where is my heath bar. And he had eaten it and not even realized.

Allegedly.

I was so furious that the memory still makes me want to… scream.

Anyway I’m completely normal about ice cream and I come to you today with something that I truly believe is the culmination of my life’s work. It’s all been building to this, a taste test courtesy of Jeni’s.

Jeni’s has a pretty unique cookie dough flavor that has been in and out of rotation until this spring, when they made it available for shipping nationwide. It is so beloved, one dude’s quest to get them to bring it back became his whole Twitter personality.

This gentleman and I seem like the same level of insane

Jeni’s is so confident in the supremacy of their cookie dough flavor that they reached out asking me to compare their pint to some other top brands.

I do feel I was born for this.

They sent six cartons of cookie dough ice cream to my house, and I made the very brave decision to invite my brother to join me in the taste test. Not that he deserved my benificence, but I was feeling magnanimous due to the sheer volume of treats. My husband Alex was called in to mediate participate.

Here are the contenders.

Halo Top: chocolate chip cookie dough light ice cream

We started with Halo Top, a diet ice cream that clearly did not stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. It tasted like chemicals. Next.

Ben & Jerry’s: vanilla ice cream with gobs of chocolate chip cookie dough

A reasonably-priced grocery and drugstore standby, this was better than I expected. There is a strong vanilla flavor to the ice cream that Alex found “comforting,” peppered with a generous amount of cookie dough that tastes more like sugar cookie than chocolate chip. Some people who aren’t me may prefer that. I’m on the record as being a sugar cookie hater.

Haagen-Dazs: chocolate chip cookie dough

This was the go-to brand at our house growing up. It is my mom’s favorite, and was my grandma’s too. So I was surprised we didn’t like it as much as Ben and Jerry’s. Haagen-Dazs makes a mean vanilla, but the cookie dough felt like an afterthought. The chunks are few and far between, with negligible chocolate flecks. The three of us agreed this one was not very exciting.

Graeter’s: cookie dough chocolate chip “French pot” ice cream

We audibly gasped when I popped the lid of the Graeter’s pint. The chocolate chunks are so big it feels like someone was just breaking off pieces of a bar by hand, and taste noticeably high-quality. The cookie dough flavor was also top-notch. “It feels like this would actually be a delicious cookie if you were to bake it,” Nick said, which I admit is a good point. The ice cream is silky with a perfect flavor balance and we couldn’t get over how heavy-handed they are with the treasures. A unanimous LOVE.

Van Leeuwen: malted cookie dough shake French ice cream

Poor Van Leeuwen- we should have had this before Graeter’s, because the chocolate chunk situation was good compared to the others. Compared to Graeter’s, though, they are also a bit stingier with the cookie dough. What does make this pint unique is the malted flavor of the ice cream base. As a huge Whoppers fan, I loved that roasty toasty element. To me, it’s so much more interesting than vanilla. I would happily never eat vanilla ice cream again in my life if it could always be malted instead.

Jeni’s Double Dough: chocolate chip cookie dough swirled into a buttery brown sugar custard

Once a save-the-best-for-last girl, always a save-the-best-for-last girl. Like Van Leeuwen, Jeni’s also left plain vanilla in the dust with a base of brown sugar ice cream that gives off strong Speculoos cookie butter vibes. The chocolate is not the point here, but Alex preferred the caramelly notes of the ice cream to anything else we’d tried. A scoop of this tastes like eating Biscoff cookies in ice cream form, so the cookie dough pieces themselves are almost superfluous. But we appreciated that they were evenly and generously distributed. Nick and I were able to dig around without bickering, which may have been the sweetest treat of all.