"you date a girl and find out later/she smells just like a percolator"*

I hope that Trader Joe's hasn't done one of their nasty things again, like they did with the amazing salt caramels. If their new Coffee Ice Cream is another seasonal-only addiction that will have me again begging TJ's to make it a year-round staple, I'm not ready. Let me backtrack by saying that I've got a third generation black belt in ice cream. "Ice cream is dinner," my uncle answered during my last visit home after I ate ice cream instead of dinner. Growing up in northern New England, it was commonplace to head to a local farmstand after dinner for fresh ice cream, and it wasn't until I moved to New York in my mid-twenties that I realized fresh ice cream wasn't readily available in other major cities.

Not that this has stemmed my addiction, but it has put a crimp in it, and I've had had to make do with either mass-market or smaller, expensive brands that tend to get too creative and sacrifice taste. When it comes to coffee ice cream, there's a lot of competition and Starbucks four-coffee-flavor line has been my current favorite, vying with San Francisco's Double Rainbow's "Coffee Blast" brand, when it's available, at Trader Joe's. Their coffee flavor is creamy, with a strong bite and ground-to-a-teeny-fleck beans throughout, that makes for a delicious and lingering spoonful. When I saw Trader Joe's advertising it's own coffee ice cream in the latest Fearless Flyer, I knew I'd give it a try. I mean, how could anyone ignore this:

Trader Joe's Coffee Ice Cream is, in our humble opinion, the very best coffee ice cream available anywhere on planet Earth. Or beyond. Lest you think we hyperbolize - which we would never, ever do - we're prepared to tell you exactly what makes this ice cream so special.

First and foremost, you should know that we would not even consider putting this ice cream - or any other product, for that matter - into our private label unless was something quite special. And what's so special about it? Well, our Coffee Ice Cream has very low overrun. Overrun, in ice cream speak, is the amount of air that's whipped into the ice cream - the higher the overrun, the lower quality the ice cream. Because there is so little air in this ice cream, it is thicker, richer, and creamier than lesser quality ice creams. And then there's the flavor. It's a WOW. Some coffee ice creams have a little coffee flavor. Our Coffee Ice Cream features big, bold, intense coffee flavor with bits of very finely ground coffee.

The bolding and caps are all theirs. But I do know a thing or two about overrun, because as much as I loathe it, sometimes I try and eat those "churned" lower-fat ice creams, which only result in overrun-caused disappointment, sending me back to the real thing. That would be today, when I headed over to TJ's. It seems I'm not the only one - I grabbed one of the last quarts, although I did see a clerk with a large stack on his way to restock.

And here it sits, in my favorite ice cream cup, savored, smelled, eaten. And eaten. Test-wise, it's an exact duplicate of Double Rainbow's Coffee Blast, right down to the ground coffee and super-creamy satiny-velvet texture. Which, although a tie, makes it better than any other supermarket brand coffee ice cream in Southern California. And $3.99 is a heckuva lot less than that gallon of overrun churned-vanilla-concoction that's taking up too much space in my freezer.

*lyrics from "The Coffee Song."

Photo by DeaPeaJay via Flickr.