Tag: Tillamook

Baking. It takes forever, right?

Putting out the ingredients, preheating the oven, mixing the ingredients, spraying non-stick cooking spray, scrolling through a 2,000-word personal story to get to a recipe you found on the internet, waiting for your item to bake, and then opening the oven, which instantly burns your face and fogs up your glasses uses up so much precious time we have on this planet.

Thanks to Tillamook and its Limited Edition Apple Crisp Ice Cream, I can now enjoy the dessert’s flavors without touching an oven, glasses fogging up, or having my scrolling to the recipe be interrupted by a pop-up telling me to sign up for a newsletter.

The seasonal flavor features vanilla ice cream, crisp apples, and baked oatmeal streusel pieces. When I learned about this new variety, I wondered why it didn’t have apple-flavored ice cream. But, much like apple pies, apple crisps tend to be served with vanilla ice cream, so the basic base makes sense.

In my review of Tillamook’s Chocolate Collection, I complained about the tub’s lack of mix-ins. Many spoonfuls ended up without any. I don’t know if the folks at Tillamook read that review, but with this limited edition flavor, I have no criticisms about the number of mix-ins because they’re everywhere and hard to miss, no matter where you aim your spoon. Albeit, they’re small. However, if you take a normal spoonful, you’re guaranteed to get some, whether it be the sugary bite of the streusel, chewy oats, or the crisp apples. Even when I took dainty scoops using only my spoon’s tip and aiming for sections that looked like there were no mix-ins, I ended up with one almost every time.

The crisp apples are the fifth ingredient listed, but I only came upon a few tiny fruit pieces during the two servings I had. However, those were surprisingly crisp. Although it’s more of an icy crispiness, if that makes sense. But it somewhat fools my teeth into thinking they’re biting into crisp apples. Honestly, I thought “crisp” was there to fluff up the description, but color me surprised. Even though the fruit pieces aren’t abundant, I also got a nice apple flavor with the bites that had the oats and/or the sugary streusel pieces.

The mild apple taste from the mix-ins, the brown sugar bursts from the streusel pieces, and the vanilla ice cream create a delicious dessert scoop that can be enjoyed in a fraction of the time it takes to preheat an oven.

Apple crisps are considered a fall dessert, so I’m not sure how much longer Tillamook’s Limited Edition Apple Crisp Ice Cream will be on shelves. I hope it comes back next fall. But if you find it, I recommend picking up a tub because it has all the flavors and textures of the baked dessert.

Purchased Price: $8.99*
Size: 1.5 qt
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 8 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 220 calories, 12 grams of fat, 8 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 35 milligrams of cholesterol, 75 milligrams of sodium, 25 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 23 grams of sugar (including 18 grams of added sugar), and 3 grams of protein.

*Because I live on a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, things are a bit pricier here. You’ll probably pay less than I did.

I decided to take up significant space in our freezer to store all four flavors of Tillamook’s Chocolate Collection Ice Cream. Did I have to heat up and eat bags of frozen broccoli, peas, and edamame to make room for the tower of 1.5-quart tubs? Yes. So, thank you, Tillamook, for making me eat a bunch of green vegetables so I could eat a bunch of brown chocolate ice creams.

Brownie Batter

Since the following is the case with three of the four flavors, I’ll get it out of the way here. The ice cream-to-mix-ins and swirls ratio leans heavily to the dairy side, making it hard to get everything in one spoonful. With this flavor, there are brownie dough pieces within the dark chocolate brownie batter ice cream, but they are few and far between. Well, at least, throughout the one-fourth of the container I’ve eaten so far. The smallish pieces have a bold fudge flavor and a pleasant chew that contrasts nicely with the base’s creaminess. But the lack of mix-ins isn’t all that bad because the base has a tasty brownie batter-ish flavor. It definitely tastes different from the bases in the other three varieties, which have a standard chocolate ice cream flavor.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 220 calories, 12 grams of fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 40 milligrams of cholesterol, 80 milligrams of sodium, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 5 grams of fiber, 22 grams of sugar (including 18 grams of added sugar), and 5 grams of protein.

Chocolate Hazelnut

Hoping for Nutella vibes here? You’re not getting that. The container contains dark chocolate ice cream with hazelnuts and a hazelnut butter swirl. There are decent-sized hazelnuts, but, oddly, they don’t provide much of any hazelnut taste, only the snap of the nut when I bite into them. Doing all the hazelnut flavor lifting is that stiff hazelnut butter swirl that stands out within the dark chocolate base. Get a spoonful with a hazelnut, some of the swirl, and the base, and you’ve got yourself a Ferrero Rocher on a spoon. But, again, since the mix-ins and swirls aren’t plentiful, most spoonfuls taste like chocolate ice cream.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 240 calories, 15 grams of fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 40 milligrams of cholesterol, 45 milligrams of sodium, 25 grams of carbohydrates, 5 grams of fiber, 22 grams of sugar (including 17 grams of added sugar), and 6 grams of protein.

German Chocolate Cake

I didn’t think I’d like this one because I’m not a fan of German Chocolate Cake. But the ingredient I dislike about the dessert, shredded coconut, doesn’t show itself much in this flavor, which contains dark chocolate ice cream with a brown sugar coconut swirl, pecans, and chocolate cake pieces. It’s not very coconutty because the swirl is sparse. I’ve gone through about one-fifth of the container and can recall tasting something coconut only twice. But I did bite through three pecan pieces and two cake pieces, which were chewy but not as much as the brownie chunks in the other variety. But, much like the flavor above, there were too many spoonfuls that were just the ice cream base. This was probably the least memorable of them all.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 230 calories, 13 grams of fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 40 milligrams of cholesterol, 65 milligrams of sodium, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 4 grams of fiber, 23 grams of sugar (including 19 grams of added sugar), and 5 grams of protein.

Dark Chocolate Cookies & Cream

Finally, we have a simple flavor that features dark chocolate ice cream with crunchy cookie pieces. “Crunchy” is how Tillamook describes the cookies on the container, but inside, most are as soft as cookies super soaked in milk. But Tillamook didn’t just add chocolate wafers and dust off cookie crumbs from its hands. It included sandwich cookie chunks, so there are also white creme bits. Oddly, that frozen creme does add some texture that should’ve come from the cookies. Unlike the other varieties, this one had a decent amount of mix-ins. However, I will admit that the photo above doesn’t represent the slightly scarcer layers under it. The cookies add a different, dark chocolatey burst than the ice cream. But like the previous two flavors, get a spoonful without a mix-in, and it’s total choco ice cream.

Rating: 7 out of 10<
Nutrition Facts: (2/3 cup) 230 calories, 12 grams of fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 35 milligrams of cholesterol, 85 milligrams of sodium, 28 grams of carbohydrates, 4 grams of fiber, 23 grams of sugar (including 19 grams of added sugar), and 5 grams of protein.

Because I had all four flavors and for funsies, I combined them all, and that changed nothing because the chocolate base still dominated most spoonfuls.

I enjoyed all the flavors, but none of them wowed me, even the Brownie Batter one. With most, because the chocolate base is so bold and there are limited mix-ins, they tasted like I was eating regular chocolate ice cream 65-70 percent of the time. I can’t believe I’m kind of complaining about eating regular chocolate ice cream. What kind of monster have I become? Maybe these would’ve been better as pints, so the ice cream-to-mix-in ratio would’ve been better.

Purchased Price: $4.99 each (on sale)
Size: 1.5 quart containers
Purchased at: Safeway