We Ranked This Blue Bell Ice Cream Flavor The Best Of Them All

With all the ice cream flavors in creation, and all of the brands lining supermarket and grocery store shelves, you might feel required to climb a veritable mountain of scoops before even shining up your spoon. So Chowhound performed some of that confectionary athleticism for you. We ranked vanilla ice cream varieties from worst to best, tested store-bought chocolate ice cream options, and we even honed in on single labels to identify the tastiest frozen treats. And in our roundup of Blue Bell's finest ice cream flavors, the vanilla-based, dual mix-in Cookie Two-Step took the top spot.

One obvious factor took precedent through the evaluation of 11 Blue Bell flavors: how they tasted overall. We also considered a little more granularly how concentrated that taste was, the pleasantness of texture, and, for the purposes of publication, how crowd-pleasing each bit of zhuzhed up dairy was likely to be. Only the Cookie Two-Step won each of these categories.

Does the Cookie Two-Step's extra add-ins give it an edge over simpler competitors, like the homemade vanilla that ranked lower? In this case, yes. While real vanilla is a complex, nuanced bouquet that defies the tired idiom that it's somehow plain, whatever Blue Bell did (or didn't do) to its own vanilla was, in fact, too boring and basic. While the Cookie Two-step is also vanilla-based, the addition of its one-two punch of chocolate crème-filled cookies and chocolate chip cookie dough send what seemed a ho-hum vanilla into a more exceptional chocolate-packed category.

The more dynamic texture of Cookie Two-Step ended up being crucial here. The creamy vanilla base was emboldened by the yielding bits of chewy chocolate cookie dough and crumbly chocolate crème-filled flecks that take the cookies and cream notion you might be more familiar with into new territory. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Blue Bell's Bride's Cake also broached new territory: ice cream we don't want to eat. It came in dead last. An almond ice cream base with white cake pieces and amaretto cream cheese icing ultimately failed to deliver a happily ever after. Save your first dance for the Cookie Two-Step instead.