Central Dairy: Chocolate Mint Chip
Earlier in January, when my boyfriend, Brett, was visiting me in Eldon, we drove out to Versailles to the amazing Mennonite market, Weaver's. A few thing about this place. First, when you are in Missouri, it's pronounced Versails. Second, I can easily drop like $50 on things that aren't actually food, just impulse buys, at Weaver's. They just have everything you could ever want, like amazing homemade salsa, and homemade jam, and pickled asparagus, and banana peppers, and cappuccino peanut butter, and flavored hot cocoa mixes, and grapefruit gummies, and purple sweet potato chips, and omg yum. When I was there with Brett I bought some tasty looking little Green Mint Chocolate Chips. Then, once I decided to start doing some Sundae Sundays or Sunday Sundaes or whatever you want to call them, I knew I had to do a mint chocolate chip sundae.
One of the fun things about doing Sunday Sundae is that is giving me an opportunity to try/review some more basic flavors. I haven't had just a plain old Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream in soooo long. Central Dairy's flavor is described as A Traditional Combination of Cool Mint Ice Cream and Chocolate Chips.
However, Central Dairy is being pretty non traditional with this ice cream. Not with anything related to the flavor or texture, but with the name. If you read the title of this blog post carefully, you would see that Central Dairy named this flavor Chocolate Mint Chip, not Mint Chocolate Chip. Way to break the mold, Central Dairy.
Now for the ice cream. The adjective, "cool" is definitely accurate for the base flavor. The mint of the base was a bit stronger, and, yes, "cooler" than the average base to a mint chocolate chip at a comparable price point. This would be due to the fact that Central Dairy is using a peppermint flavor for the base.
Though I would not compare this to seasonal peppermint candy ice creams, it wasn't that strong. The texture of the base is relatively soft, light, and airy, and gets sort of frothy when it melts. Now for the chips. A lot of mint chip flavors have a sort of crackly, thin almost swirl of chips running through the ice cream. This was not like that. These were real honest to goodness chips. They were rectangular and a bit smaller in volume than your average chocolate chip. They were definitely dark chocolate, yum. They were also hard and brittle, but only in that wonderful way that dark chocolate is, not in a bad way. There were not enough of them for how good they were. You got between 1 and 2 per bite. Also, since they were small you could have more of them and that would be a better amount of textural variation, in my opinion.
Overall, this ice cream was pretty good, but not so good that you wouldn't want to turn it into a sundae. In fact, putting more chocolate chips on it would be perfect, since this ice cream was kind of lacking in the chocolate chip abundance department.
Now to talk a bit about my sundae real quick. First my roommate is da bomb and got me this cool ice cream cone shaped glass for my birthday. It is the perfect size for a sundae, and since it is clear and with the way it shapes it lets me take awesome pictures of the sundaes I'm creating! Woo!!
I've talked about the hot fudge and white chocolate chips that I used for this sundae in my Blue Bell Strawberries & Homemade Vanilla post. The mint chips I got from Weaver's market were good, but the mint flavoring in them was not nearly as strong as the ice cream, so it was really just like they added more textural variation. I would definitely use them next time to top a vanilla or chocolate ice cream, not a mint one. All in all, this was a great sundae, and really took this Central Dairy flavor to the next level.
Lastly, interesting tidbit I learned about white chocolate from the packaging of these chips (and then a bit of my own research). Because of the lack of antioxidants, white chocolate is especially susceptible to light-induced degradation of flavor. Hershey's, luckily, has designed their packaging to help prevent that, but pro-tip: keep your white chocolate in a dark place!
http://www.blommer.com/_documents/conquering-shelf-life-issues-of-chocolate.pdf
One of the fun things about doing Sunday Sundae is that is giving me an opportunity to try/review some more basic flavors. I haven't had just a plain old Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream in soooo long. Central Dairy's flavor is described as A Traditional Combination of Cool Mint Ice Cream and Chocolate Chips.
However, Central Dairy is being pretty non traditional with this ice cream. Not with anything related to the flavor or texture, but with the name. If you read the title of this blog post carefully, you would see that Central Dairy named this flavor Chocolate Mint Chip, not Mint Chocolate Chip. Way to break the mold, Central Dairy.
Now for the ice cream. The adjective, "cool" is definitely accurate for the base flavor. The mint of the base was a bit stronger, and, yes, "cooler" than the average base to a mint chocolate chip at a comparable price point. This would be due to the fact that Central Dairy is using a peppermint flavor for the base.
Yes those are my legs. But if you look closely, you can see "Peppermint flavor" in the ingredients.
Though I would not compare this to seasonal peppermint candy ice creams, it wasn't that strong. The texture of the base is relatively soft, light, and airy, and gets sort of frothy when it melts. Now for the chips. A lot of mint chip flavors have a sort of crackly, thin almost swirl of chips running through the ice cream. This was not like that. These were real honest to goodness chips. They were rectangular and a bit smaller in volume than your average chocolate chip. They were definitely dark chocolate, yum. They were also hard and brittle, but only in that wonderful way that dark chocolate is, not in a bad way. There were not enough of them for how good they were. You got between 1 and 2 per bite. Also, since they were small you could have more of them and that would be a better amount of textural variation, in my opinion.
Overall, this ice cream was pretty good, but not so good that you wouldn't want to turn it into a sundae. In fact, putting more chocolate chips on it would be perfect, since this ice cream was kind of lacking in the chocolate chip abundance department.
Now to talk a bit about my sundae real quick. First my roommate is da bomb and got me this cool ice cream cone shaped glass for my birthday. It is the perfect size for a sundae, and since it is clear and with the way it shapes it lets me take awesome pictures of the sundaes I'm creating! Woo!!
I've talked about the hot fudge and white chocolate chips that I used for this sundae in my Blue Bell Strawberries & Homemade Vanilla post. The mint chips I got from Weaver's market were good, but the mint flavoring in them was not nearly as strong as the ice cream, so it was really just like they added more textural variation. I would definitely use them next time to top a vanilla or chocolate ice cream, not a mint one. All in all, this was a great sundae, and really took this Central Dairy flavor to the next level.
Lastly, interesting tidbit I learned about white chocolate from the packaging of these chips (and then a bit of my own research). Because of the lack of antioxidants, white chocolate is especially susceptible to light-induced degradation of flavor. Hershey's, luckily, has designed their packaging to help prevent that, but pro-tip: keep your white chocolate in a dark place!
http://www.blommer.com/_documents/conquering-shelf-life-issues-of-chocolate.pdf
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