New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area stores: Blue Bell summer flavors ice cream

by Teresa Gubbins

Four summer-season Blue Bell ice cream flavors have turned up in supermarkets in the past few weeks. Two of them -- Southern blackberry cobbler and Delta Blues -- were actually introduced last summer (although they never made it into my local store, and still have the "New!" slogan on the carton). These are typical Blue Bell, in that they're basically vanilla ice cream with some kind of fruit. (See cherry vanilla, strawberries & vanilla, peaches & vanilla, etc.)

The other two -- Chocolate Extreme and Candy Jar -- have the Rocky-Road-type junk mixed in that younger consumers like.

• Southern blackberry cobbler. Vanilla ice cream with blackberry sauce swirl and what they describe as "flaky pie crust pieces". First of all, there's hardly any blackberry sauce swirl; it's mostly vanilla ice cream. This is in keeping with how Blue Bell usually does things, which is to apply the sauce sparingly. The "pie crust pieces" are little pucks, firm not flaky, with a weird "buttery-crust" flavor that leaves a pronounced aftertaste. You eat them not because they taste good but because they're the only diversion in an otherwise dull ice cream.
• Delta Blues. Basically a blueberry version of the blackberry cobbler, but with a much stronger berry presence in the ice cream with bits of blueberry mixed in, along with blueberry sauce and the pie crust pieces. The stronger blueberry flavor in the ice cream makes this one more interesting than the bland, overly sweet blackberry; but this one's harder to find in stores.
• Chocolate Extreme. Chocolate ice cream, chocolate fudge swirl, chocolate-coated peanut butter cups, pecans, almonds, and walnuts. There are people who like a bunch of crap loaded into their ice cream, and there are people who don't. This ice cream falls into the "loaded" category; however, Blue Bell's trademark stinginess works out well for once. Rather than a whole bunch of stuff barely bound together in ice cream, it's ice cream sprinkled with some stuff. And other than the choco-PB-cups, the stuff that's added -- nuts and fudge swirl -- isn't too rich. Even someone who doesn't usually like chocolate ice cream would find this to be pretty good.
• Candy Jar. Caramel ice cream with peanut-butter cups, chocolate chunks, peanut brittle, chunks of caramel, and chocolate crisp pieces. The assortment of stuff is fairly appealing and, like the Chocolate Extreme, there's less junk than you'd expect and so the ice cream benefits accordingly.

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