A Storied Cookies 'n' Cream Past

I have never liked the Oreo. Straight up? Dry and bland. Dunked in milk? Soggy and ruins the milk. Coffee? You’d have to be nuts. But on one fine day, about 20 years ago, a Steve’s ice cream opened in our suburb of Dallas. Steve’s was one of the first ice cream places to take the toppings and ice cream and mash them up right before your eyes (Now we have Maggie Moo’s and Cold Stone Creamery, both of which don’t even rank on my ice cream scale). And though I was no friend of the Oreo, I thought, “If a free-thinking human being is mashing up huge chunks of the thing, certainly, the Oreo could finally reach its full potential as an excellent cookie and ice cream add-in.” So, I went for it, and I was forever hooked on cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream, simply because it was mashed up, frozen, and embedded in ice cream.

Since then, Steve’s closed, and I moved on to Blue Bell’s (Texas ice cream), Ben and Jerry’s, and Häagen Dazs’s respective versions of cookies ‘n’ cream, all of which I have eaten straight out of the carton while watching television. But I always felt that those companies didn’t capitalize on the cookie chunk as much as they should have, and certainly there had to be an ice cream out there that knew what the cookie could really do.

And then, when I moved to Northern Virginia (via other places with substandard cookies ‘n’ cream recipes), the search for the best cookies ‘n’ cream came to a screeching halt. The Sundae Times in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria proudly serves Gifford’s ice cream, a company that has been serving the DC area for more than 60 years. And I can now say with confidence that Gifford's makes the best cookies ‘n’ cream I have ever had. Here’s why:

1.    When the proprietor hands over the small cup of ice cream, I can just see the dome of ice cream bursting with enormous chunks of cookie. There have been times when I have encountered an almost entirely WHOLE cookie!

2.    The cookie chunks are always completely frozen solid. This is key. There have been times when I’ve bitten into a dish of cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream when, for whatever reason, the cookie isn’t completely frozen, and is, therefore, a lot like the dry bland cookie that I loathe to this day.

3.    A frozen solid cookie also means really, really cold sweet cream ice cream, the kind that takes serious muscle contraction to get even a small bite. But when the icy coldness hits the 98.6 degrees of my mouth, it turns into a nectar of the creamiest kind. That, friends, is what cookies 'n' cream ice cream is and always will be to me.  —AK