Ben & Jerry's S'mores Ice Cream

Time to taste test another variation of Ben & Jerry's rich chocolate ice cream. Oh, what a difficult life I lead!

Like Ben & Jerry's Phish Food ice cream, which I recently tried, their S'mores flavor promises a tasty-sounding marshmallow swirl running through chocolate ice cream, this time accompanied by fudge chunks and a graham cracker swirl to mimic the taste of everyone's favorite campfire treat. And just like my experience with Phish Food, the enticement of the marshmallow swirl in S'mores ended up being a disappointment.  I can barely taste this supposed marshmallow swirl, if at all.  Where present, I think it may make the overall texture of the ice cream somewhat more pleasantly gooey, but I can't detect a discernable difference in flavor due to the inclusion of the marshmallow swirl in either Phish Food or S'mores. Maybe I've been sampling a batch or two of these flavors that were made when the Ben & Jerry's factory was running low on marshmallow goodness? Or maybe marshmallow is just not a strong enough flavor to compete with the amazing rich Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice cream that I love so much. Perhaps I need to taste test a non-chocolate flavor of B&J's with a marshmallow swirl at some point soon. In any case, I have decided that I will no longer consider the inclusion of a marshmallow swirl as a significant selling point for any Ben & Jerry's flavor.

It almost goes without saying at this point that I love Ben & Jerry's basic but oh-so-rich chocolate ice cream, and the inclusion of fudge chunks is almost always a virtue, so I'll just move right on to the other feature of the S'mores flavor - the graham cracker swirl. While I really enjoy the graham cracker flavor, I'm less than excited about having the somewhat gritty texture of a graham cracker mixed throughout my bowl of creamy ice cream. While true to the actual texture of graham crackers, the swirl in S'mores is more gritty than the cookie swirl in the Ben & Jerry's Milk & Cookies flavor, which took me a while to get used to - but I must admit that I now truly enjoy the chocolate chip cookie swirl in the latter flavor. I don't think that I will ever truly enjoy the graham cracker grit swirled throughout S'mores, though.

To be fair, my husband had a different experience when sampling B&J's S'mores.  While he thought that the flavor of the marshmallow swirl was certainly less prominent than the chocolate flavor of the ice cream, he could easily detect the marshmallow flavoring, which he enjoyed quite a bit.  When I asked him what he thought about the gritty graham cracker swirl, he said that he had barely tasted the graham cracker at all.  So strangely enough, even though we were eating from the same pint, my husband and I experienced the graham cracker and the marshmallow in opposite ways - I got too much graham cracker grit and not enough marshmallow taste, while he didn't taste the graham cracker and thought that the marshmallow was strong enough.  I'm not really sure how to account for that, other than differences in taste buds.

In the end, though, my personal rating is determined by my own experience of the ice cream.  So while I appreciate the overall brilliance of the idea to create an ice cream flavor that mimics s'mores, I feel like this is one of those Ben & Jerry's flavors that less-than-optimally delivers on its promise.  I would suggest to Ben and Jerry that they ought to put their top food scientists back to work on this flavor, though.  If they could bring out the marshmallow flavor more and smooth the texture of the graham cracker swirl, I would be more than a little excited to try the beta version of S'mores. But as it stands, this isn't a flavor that I plan on purchasing much, because with so many other Ben & Jerry's variations on chocolate ice cream, why bother to put up with the bothersome gritty graham cracker texture?  S'mores gets 3.5 stars and a slightly sad, disappointed shake of my head.