Review: Private Selection Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge Truffle Ice Cream

My binge through Private Selection products and through the Kroger family of stores continues this week with another review of one of their store branded (sort of) products in this pint of Private Selection Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge Truffle Ice Cream.  Some of the prior reviews have been hit or miss, so this will be another notch to determine whether positive or negative reviews are a trend in either direction.  Like the others, I picked this one up in a special sale at Kroger for $0.99.  Each pint contains the typical four half-cup servings and each serving of gourmet ice cream clocks in at 220 calories.

I love being lazy, so I'll leave it to Private Selection to describe this:  "caramel, hazelnut and fudge truffles folded into chocolate ganache ice cream."  I love it when products use the word "folded" to describe the flavor combination.  I have no clue why I love that, but it amuses me for some particular reason.  Maybe it's the visualization of thinking of some dope standing at a cold stone (like at Cold Stone Creamery) taking time to delicate produce this concoction for me.  Ridiculous visualization, I know, but I'm a bit off (i.e. crazy).  Anyway, this chocolate ganache ice cream smelled strongly of chocolate and was particularly fluffy, so that was fun.  The truffles were amply spread throughout the pint (my picture notwithstanding...I need to get better at this blogging thing), so I knew that I wouldn't be getting cheated on mix-ins and that is ALWAYS a positive.  As for those truffles, they were a hard chocolate fudge exterior as you can see above and the interior consisted of caramel and hazelnut, so from a presentation standpoint, this one was nailed.  As you can also see in my pint above, some of those truffles exploded to the pressure of the ice cream and left me with what was essentially a fun hazelnut and caramel swirl.

For my first spoonful, I dove into the plain chocolate ganache ice cream and all I can say is DELICIOUS.  It was rich, fluffy and had excellent chocolate flavor.  That chocolate flavor was not sweet, but it was one of the most chocolate tasting chocolate ice creams that I've ever had, if that makes any sense (chocolate flavor in ice creams tends to be "thin" in my experiences).  I then went for one of the truffles and while they were frozen and required a bit of a chomp to break up, the internal gooey caramel and hazel nut flavor alternated between being both sweet and nutty.  The chocolate exterior then coated both of those flavorings to provide something that was basically the definition of decadence.  Lastly, I mixed both the truffles and the chocolate ganache ice cream together and it should come as no surprise that the combination was delicious since I found them both to be yummy on their own.  Adding them together just made this the total package of delicious.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Yummy, yummy, yummy, so BUY IT.  Duh.  Honestly for a "store brand" ice cream, Private Selection has got something that they should be very proud of because I would say that this would hold its own and perhaps surpass some of the name brand premium ice creams that are available in the freezer cases of those exact same stores.  They don't put these Private Selection products at ridiculously low sale levels like this one often, but next time they do, I don't think I'll hesitate to grab this flavor out of the case.

BUY IT!!