Thursday, April 18, 2013

Review: Haagen-Dazs Peanut Butter Pie Ice Cream


I must have lived a sheltered childhood because up until about five years ago, I had never heard of Peanut Butter Pie in my life, which is strange.  It's strange because as this blog has shown, I am all about EVERYTHING regarding peanut butter.  When I found out about Peanut Butter Pie though,  it was almost as if I had been opened up into a whole new and wonderful world.  I ended trying some, making some and basically becoming addicted to them.  When I learned via several blog reviews that there was a limited edition Haagen-Dazs Peanut Butter Pie Ice Cream, I knew I had to get my hands on a container once I saw it in the store.  Luckily, my local Marsh started carrying it, so on my way home from the gym one day (hilarious that I'd pick this up after that and you'll see why), I picked up a fourteen ounce container of this in a buy two, get one free sale for $4.25 to add to this week's growing list of reviews.  Each container is the usual 3.5 half-cup servings and what makes the fact that I bought this after the gym amusing is that each of those servings is a very gym-negating 310 calories.



One aspect where this interpretation of peanut butter pie differs from the one I make on my own is that Haagen-Dazs has chosen chocolate as the pie crust for their interpretation  while I use graham crackers as mine (I've tried both and prefer graham).  Because of that, there are chocolate pie crust "cookies" littered throughout this container to add crunch and chocolate flavor to their concoction.  As for the rest, it's just like you'd find in a peanut butter pie.  The ice cream base is peanut butter ice cream with a peanut butter swirl that hardens to form something like a crunchy textural ribbon that runs throughout the container.  Those two peanut butter components are joined by the chocolate cookie crust-type pieces and that's about it for the mix.  The peanut butter ice cream itself is very creamy (typical Haagen-Dazs; it is super premium after all) and has a very strong scent of peanut butter permeating from the container.  Basically, if you love peanut butter like I do, your eyes might roll back in your head from delight before you even take a spoonful of this.

The smell is delightful and so is the taste.  This is peanut butter, peanut butter and more peanut butter.  Occasionally there's a hit of chocolate from the cookies, but it's truly a peanut butter lover's delight.  The creamy ice cream makes it resemble eating smooth peanut butter straight from a jar (guilty as charged on that one more times than I care to remember) and if it is truly trying to emulate a peanut butter pie, that creamy texture nails the actual pie texture right on.  The peanut butter flavor itself is quite sweet and since I lean toward the sweet over salty preference of peanut butter, that was exactly up my alley and I appreciated that. With the addition of the hardened peanut butter swirl, there's even more peanut butter flavor, but also the added textural component of what I guess I could call crunchy peanut butter.  What I can say about this entire container though is that it is extremely rich.  So rich, in fact, that I could only eat a few spoonfuls at a time and could not inhale it like I would a typical container of ice cream.  That's probably a good thing in terms of presenting brain freeze and also keeping the calorie count down.  That richness is the only drawback to this, if you can call it that.

Buy It or Fly By It?  In the end though, this is a more than reasonable approximation of the truly wonderful peanut butter pie, except in obvious frozen form.  If you can approximate something as wonderful as a peanut butter pie, you absolutely get a BUY IT rating in my book and this gets that.  Like its namesake pie though, it's probably best to have this as only an occasional treat for two reasons (one is a result of the other).  First, it's not exactly calorie friendly and because of that, the speed at which I wolf it down makes that calorie unfriendliness have a very negative impact on my waistline, which after this week will be pretty much shot anyway, so I guess I shouldn't be concerned.

BUY IT!!
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3 comments:

  1. Glad to hear you enjoyed it as much as I did. Hopefully the mix-ins in your pint increased after the picture you took. If not, I must have just got lucky...mine was completely packed full of peanut butter and chocolate cookies.

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    Replies
    1. They did increase slightly, although not by a ton. That's okay though as this was still a flavorful container of ice cream.

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  2. OMG your descriptions and reviews are amazing and so mouthwatering :D should be studying right now, came across your blog, got stuck, got convinced, on my way to the store now... Thanks ;)

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