Blue Bell: Strawberries & Homemade Vanilla

Happy National Strawberry Ice Cream Day!! Now I know not everyone is a fan of these sort of arbitrary food holidays, but I am trying to use them as an opportunity to eat ice cream outside of what I normally eat. Not that I don't like strawberry ice cream, but I would not call myself a connoisseur like Madeline would and I would probably choose cookie dough or something over strawberry ice cream. I also have been wanting to try another flavor of Blue Bell after my review of their Old Fashioned Malt Shoppe was so popular.

This flavor is described as Our famous Homemade Vanilla ice cream blended with juicy ripe strawberries. 

So random notes about Blue Bell. I absolutely love their packaging. I honestly bought this pint over the Haagen Dazs Strawberry because the packaging was so pretty. Also Madeline has already reviewed the Haagen Dazs Strawberry flavor.

When I opened this pint I saw a light pink, fluffy looking ice cream with bits of strawberry poking through. This ice cream has lots of air whipped into it and isn't super rich.

Which is also reflected in the calorie content, 160 calories per half cup. However, this is not a bad thing as Blue Bell is just using skim milk and not gross artificial sweeteners to get the lower calorie content.

As for the flavor of this ice cream, the description says the base is just vanilla flavored, but I definitely tasted strawberry in the base. Maybe the strawberry chunks just kind infused into the base flavor or something.

The strawberry chunks themselves were also really good. They varied in size between one quarter and one half of a strawberry and they were just straight up tart and sweet frozen strawberry, which is what I think you would want. They were definitely juicy and just real strawberries. They could, however, have been more frequent. You got one just about every bite, but every once in a while a bite didn't have one.

Over all this ice cream tasted like strawberries and cream. It was light and creamy and also refreshing. You could have it on a hot summer day as a fruity treat or drizzle chocolate sauce on it and make it totally decadent. Which I totally did.

If you keep up with us on twitter (@stlicecreamlove) you might have seen that I made a sundae for #SundaeSunday with this ice cream. This was my first #SundaeSunday and I was considering reviewing each component of the sundae. However, then this blog might devolve into a junk food blog or dessert blog or something. Not that those are bad things, but I really don't have time to review every sweet treat that I eat. Only the frozen kind. However, I'll tell you a bit about my sundae. I use this ice cream, obviously, blueberries, Hershey's white chocolate chips, and Hershey's hot fudge sauce. The hot fudge was really good, and white chocolate chips were good, but I think I like white chocolate chunks better than chips. The chips can kinda be gritty and get stuck in your teeth, which I haven't experienced with chunks. Overall the tart and sweet combo of my sundae was really awesome.