I love a good truffle and I know that Ben & Jerry’s is most definitely referencing the chocolate kind for their new creation, Truffle Kerfuffle.

However, I also thought about the other type as well, those prized fungi that hogs sniff out from beneath the earth. I usually feel like one of those pigs when I’m eating my favorite ice cream flavor, chocolate chip cookie dough, as I always methodically seek out the glorious gobs of dough and not pay attention to much else.

Since Truffle Kerfuffle contains vanilla ice cream with roasted pecans, fudge chips and a salted chocolate ganache swirl I thought I would again be singling out one of the components and then quickly tiring of the experience once they are all gone. However, I was very pleasantly surprised as I partook in this kerfuffle.

The vanilla ice cream was a good choice for this as it serves as a nice plain base for everything that is going on around it. It adds a bit of flavor when it needs to but for the most part joins together with all the other elements and lets them shine through.

The fudge chips add great crunch as they seem to be the last to succumb to melting when outside of the freezer environment. There is also a lot of chocolate going on when you are eating it but just when you think you’ve had too much you get a pecan piece that balances out the chocolate overload while adding another flavor dimension for you to enjoy. Both the fudge chips and pecan pieces were present in healthy amounts throughout.

The star of this concoction, though, is indubitably the salted chocolate ganache swirl. It’s thick, rich and absolutely delicious. The very on-trend salt plus chocolate flavor is executed wonderfully here. It goes together perfectly with the sweet of the vanilla ice cream.

If you can’t already tell, I absolutely dug this ice cream, and yes, pun intended. However, this time around I didn’t necessarily feel like a truffle hog from just my searching expedition. Instead it was felt when I reached the bottom of the container, which meant I had just pigged out (pun intended again) on 4 servings in a matter of minutes. Whoops! Oink Oink for sure.

(Nutrition Facts – 1/2 cup – 340 calories, 220 calories from fat, 24 grams of fat, 12 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 60 milligrams of cholesterol, 135 milligrams of sodium, 28 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 24 grams of sugar, and 5 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $4.39
Size: 1 pint
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 10 out of 10
Pros: Well dispersed and abundant ingredients. Salty chocolate & sweet vanilla decadence. Pecan pieces as counterprogramming.
Cons: evouring 4x the suggested amount in one sitting. Multiple commonalities to truffle hogs.

Ben & Jerry’s Salted Caramel Almond is an exclusive Safeway flavor (plus its sister stores) and, to be honest, it’s not a particularly exciting exclusive flavor.

While Walmart gets Cotton Candy, Confetti Cake, and another flavor that probably starts with the letter C, and Target gets Blonde Ambition, Berry Voluntary, and another flavor that probably starts with the letter B, Safeway stores get a safe flavor with a safe name, which I guess is appropriate for a chain called Safeway.

The safe flavor features safe vanilla bean ice cream with safe roasted almond slivers, safe fudge flakes, and a safe salted caramel swirl.

The vanilla bean ice cream is a solid base, it’s creamy, has a pleasant vanilla flavor, and there are vanilla bean specks. Although those could be tiny bits of the fudge flakes, which taste like the fudge flakes we all know and love from the dozen or so other flavors that have them.

As for the roasted almond slivers, they’re less like whole cross-sections of the nut and more like whole cross-section of the nut smashed into pieces by a hammer. Their flavor isn’t too noticeable while eating the ice cream, but very noticeable as they stick to the nooks and crannies of your molars after the rest of the ice cream has gone down your esophagus. The salted caramel swirl has a saltiness that’s stronger when I lick my lips while eating the ice cream than when the ice cream is in my mouth.

There’s almost enough of each ingredient that you can get a bit of everything in every spoonful. With each scoop it’s a textural orchestra of gooey, creamy, snappy, and crunchy and a flavor orchestra of buttery, sweet, salty, and nutty. It’s like eating the top of a Nestle Drumstick beaten with a better ingredient stick.

It’s hard to go wrong with the combination of vanilla ice cream, chocolate, caramel, and nuts. It’s like combining rainbows, glitter, and a unicorn. With either of those combos, you know you’re going to have a good time. And while I had fun with Ben & Jerry’s Salted Caramel Almond Ice Cream, it wasn’t too exciting and tasted like something I’ve had before.

It was a safe fun, like hitting a piñata with a foam bat, without a blindfold, and doing it in the virtual world with VR goggles.

(Nutrition Facts – 1/2 cup – 290 calories, 150 calories from fat, 17 grams of fat, 10 grams of saturated fat, 0.5 grams of trans fat, 70 milligrams of cholesterol, 140 milligrams of sodium, 28 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fiber, 26 grams of sugar, and 5 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $5.99
Size: 1 pint
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: It’s like eating the top of a Nestle Drumstick that’s been beaten with a better ingredient stick. Safe flavor; it’s not weird or offensive. Lots of different flavors and textures.
Cons: Safe flavor; not as exciting as exclusive flavors at Walmart and Target. Almond slivers are almond bits. Fudge flakes seem to be in EVERYTHING.

Many people know Ben & Jerry’s for their clever flavor names. Take a commonly used phrase, change a word or syllable into an ingredient’s name, and BAM, a new ice cream flavor name is born.

Empower MINT.

Clusterfluff.

Cake My Day.

Americone Dream.

Karamel Sutra Core.

Oh, I could spend all day listing them and confusing my computer’s spell check.

But the brand has done it again with Oats of this Swirled Ice Cream. So is this ice cream out of this world? Let’s find oat.

The flavor features buttery brown sugar ice cream with fudge flakes and oatmeal cinnamon cookie swirls.

The ice cream base has a mild buttery flavor, but it was hard to taste the butteriness by itself because it seemed like cinnamon permeated through the ice cream. That reads like a complaint, but I assure you it’s not. Cinnamon and butter is a combination I love seeing together, like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I would buy the ice cream base without anything else, if Ben & Jerry’s sold it.

While the ice cream itself is great, what makes this flavor wonderful is the oatmeal cinnamon cookie swirls. It has a fine gritty texture that’s a pleasant contrast to the creamy ice cream. However, its flavor makes me think more of a snickerdoodle than an oatmeal cinnamon cookie. Again, that reads like a complaint, but I assure you it’s not because I love this swirl. But if you can taste the oats, let me know because I don’t taste or see them.

Of course, seeing oats is a good thing and a bad thing. I don’t want to see the oats because that’ll mean dealing with the chewy texture of the oats, but at the same time seeing them will help justify in my mind that maybe I’m getting some benefit from eating ice cream with half my daily saturated fat in one serving.

As for the fudge flakes, their snap added a third texture to the ice cream and there were a lot of them. When I got a spoonful with the buttery ice cream base, cinnamon swirl, and the fudge, I thought it tasted more like a spiceless Mexican hot chocolate than any cookie. Once again, that reads like a complaint, but I assure you it’s not because this pint is wonderful and really hard to put down.

(Nutrition Facts – 1/2 cup – 310 calories, 180 calories from fat, 20 grams of fat, 10 grams of saturated fat, 0.5 grams of trans fat, 70 milligrams of cholesterol, 110 milligrams of sodium, 31 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, 28 grams of sugar, and 4 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $5.99
Size: 1 pint
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 9 out of 10
Pros: Ice cream base and swirl taste more like a snickerdoodle than cinnamon oatmeal cookie. All three parts taste more like a spiceless Mexican hot chocolate. Clever name. Hard flavor to put down.
Cons: Don’t get the oats. Doesn’t bring an cinnamon oatmeal cookie to mind. Having to teach my computer’s spell check Ben & Jerry’s flavor names.