Ciao Bella White Chocolate Peppermint

I stopped in at Whole Foods on a whim to see if they had any seasonal Talenti flavors.  (They did, and I have a review coming soon!)  I also picked up a pint of Ciao Bella White Chocolate Peppermint, a seasonal flavor.  This is a Whole Foods exclusive and is part of a trio of seasonal flavors including Mulled Apple Cider Sorbetto (I can't decide if this sounds awesome or disgusting) and Honey Almond Nougat Gelato (definitely sounds awesome).

This flavor is described as

White Chocolate Peppermint gelato marries crushed, all-natural peppermint candies into white chocolate for a lush dessert that makes this classic extra decadent.

So how did this stack up against this season's other peppermint offerings? Solidly middle of the pack.
The texture was decent, but didn't really scream "gelato" to me.  I typically think of gelato as being slicker and without much air.  This was slightly wetter than ice cream, but did have an airiness more common in ice cream.

The white chocolate base was quite good, and the white chocolate flavor had staying power.  White chocolate is such a mellow flavor that it sometimes fades as you eat more and more ice cream.  The description above is not the one on the pint, and the one on the pint mentions that Ciao Bella folds stracciatella into this gelato.  I think the stracciatella really helped here.

Soooo pretty!

I was intrigued when I read the description and saw that this gelato included stracciatella.  I've only encountered stracciatella as a cream based gelato with small chocolate chunks.  According to Wikipedia, stracciatella means "rag" or "shred" in Italian.  There is a type of egg-drop soup called stracciatella soup because there are shreds of egg in the soup.  Stracciatella gelato got its name from the soup because the fine chocolate chunks that are the hallmark of the flavor are made by drizzling chocolate into the gelato at the end of the churning process, just like the egg is drizzled into the soup!  While this has been an interesting lesson it Italian cuisine, I don't think this flavor included either egg-drop soup or stracciatella gelato.  There is a third type of stracciatella: a cheese similar to a mozzarella formed using a shredding technique.  This must be what Ciao Bella uses in their White Chocolate Peppermint gelato.  All of that was to say that the stracciatella gave the white chocolate a richer flavor than it would have had alone.

The peppermint was a bit disappointing.  There was a light flavor of peppermint in every bite, but from the description, I was expecting peppermint candy chunks or shards.  ('Shards' sounds so violent, but if you've ever stabbed your sibling with a sharpened candy cane you know that shit is for real!)  Unfortunately, there were no candy cane chunks to be found.  This ice cream really could have used some textural variation, but it was not to be.

Overall, a this is a pretty good foray into seasonal flavors for Ciao Bella!