Ben & Jerry's Nutty Caramel Swirl

When I made a special pilgrimage to 7-Eleven (of which there are sadly none located close to my home) to pick up their exclusive Ben & Jerry's flavor Nutty Caramel Swirl, I learned an important lesson in ice cream economics - when a retailer has the market cornered on Ben & Jerry's, they can charge even more exorbitant prices than the already pricey $4 per pint that B&J's costs on average. After standing in line behind an adorable but frustrating elderly gentleman who slowly counted out each penny in good old fashioned change for his purchase, while I stood fidgeting and hoping that the other 3 pints of Ben & Jerry's in my car hadn't yet turned into puddles of delicious stain on the floor of the passenger side, I ended up paying $5.50 for a pint of Nutty Caramel Swirl. My thoughts as I left the 7-Eleven were running along the lines of "this flavor had better be worth that $5.50 and any additional monetary losses that I incur in melted ice cream and car mat cleaning."

Later that evening, I was trying to decide which of the four new flavors to sample, when the description of Nutty Caramel Swirl caught my eye - "nougat ice cream with peanuts, fudge flakes and a salty caramel swirl." Hmmm. "What the h*ll is nougat ice cream?" I asked my husband, a little bit perturbed. "Nougat is that chocolate stuff in candy bars," he answered, nonplussed despite my confusion and somewhat irrational annoyance with Ben & Jerry's for labeling a package with an unhelpful description.  "So it probably tastes like chocolate," he reasoned. Hmmm. I opened the pint and stared at the ice cream, which resembled the rich chocolate Ben & Jerry's ice cream not a bit. "I'm not convinced," I told him - but he had stopped caring by that point. So I was left on my own to make this all-important flavor determination. Nougat flavored ice cream was puzzling, mysterious and intriguing,  so clearly I had found the flavor to sample for the evening's taste test. Maybe there was a very good reason that Ben & Jerry's had chosen a less readily identifiable way of describing this flavor - the more curious you are about the flavor, the more you have to try it and the more willing you are to shell out that $5.50 per pint for an Exclusive Flavor.

Nougat ice cream doesn't quite live up to its mysterious name, though - as I ate up a third of the pint of Nutty Caramel Swirl, I didn't detect that it had a distinctive flavor. Instead, the indeterminate nougat ice cream gave center stage to the chunks of peanut and fudge that were enough to make this flavor positively crunchy. The peanut flavor is distinct from other Ben & Jerry's flavors that I've sampled with peanut butter flavoring - there is something very different from the strong nutty taste (thus the name of this flavor) from the sweeter, creamier flavor of peanut butter in B&J's Peanut Butter Jam Session or Banana Peanut Butter Greek Froyo, for example.

But while the "Nutty" in the name "Nutty Caramel Swirl" is the extremely accurate part of the flavor's name, slapping the word "Caramel" in the title is far less accurate, at least according to what I cpuld taste.  The caramel swirl is underwhelming, to say the least, and without much caramel, this ends up being a far less sweet flavor of ice cream. Not that it's bad to have a flavor that doesn't make your teeth buzz and immediately fall out of your jaw, but it's something to keep in mind when selecting your pint of ice cream, especially before you fork over that $5.50 at 7-Eleven. But if you want a more chunky, crunchy quintessential Ben & Jerry's ice cream experience, this is the flavor for you, since it even tops Chunky Monkey with its extreme crunch favor. It's not just the peanuts that are crunchy, either - those fudge chunks are equally loud as you chomp down on them.

Verdict? Nutty Caramel Swirl is a tasty flavor with a lot of satisfying chunks, and is worth the occasional pilgrimage to 7-Eleven and $5.50 per pint if you're in the mood for something particularly nutty. But is this going to join the regular rotaation in my freezer? Nah. At 3.5 stars, Nutty Caramel Swirl loses out to Phish Food with its higher chocolate quotient and stronger gooey caramel flavoring almost every time.