N.C. Double Scoop Round of 64: Flight 1 Write-Ups

March 8, 2007

Ladies and gentlemen, start your tongues! (What, that's not gross, you use your tongues to lick the ice cream all around for about an hour until it's compact and safe enough to tackle from above without fear of giving the sidewalk a sample.) Below are the Flight 1 write-ups with Flight 2 due to follow tomorrow, Flight 3 on Saturday, and Flight 4 on Sunday.

Okay, so the "what the hell are you on about?" explanation is here, the big ass bracket is here, and voting is NOW! (But only after you've read our write-ups, please? Because we worked really hard on them. It took us, like, five whole pints of ice cream. Each.)

1 Cookie dough vs. 16 red bean. Ugh, is there even a question here? I find red bean fairly repulsive. Then again, salmonella sufferers might feel the same about cookie dough. However, since there hasn't been a cookie dough salmonella outbreak in eons (the last food poisoning via ice cream happened with Coldstone's cake batter), I'm putting my money on cookie dough. Raw or cooked, it's better than beans.

8 AmeriCone Dream vs. 9 black raspberry/Oregon blackberry. Aw, poor Bunting. Her favorite is going to have quite a match against Stephen Colbert's freedom flavor. Aside from strawberry, I'm not much for the fruit-flavored ice creams, so I gotta go with AmeriCone Dream. And not just to suck up to Colbert; I really do love the sweet taste of liberty in my mouth. Also the caramel. And waffle cone pieces.

5 Butter pecan vs. 12 orange sherbet. I don't think I've eaten sherbet -- which I've always called by its accepted variant "sherbert" -- since I was at a twelve-year-old's birthday party. When I was twelve years old. Butter pecan is another one of my adored flavors but beyond that, I think it carries more weight than sherbet.

4 Tin Roof vs. 13 peppermint. Huh, and all this time I thought Tin Roof was a sundae dreamed up by Bridgeman's. I'm not the biggest fan of fudge swirls and chocolate-covered peanuts -- do you really need both? Also, I still think it's a sundae, not a legitimate flavor. Kicker: I simply adore peppermint -- the pink kind, not green -- and that's where I'll be voting, but I won't be surprised if my favorite melts away in the first round.

6 Chunky Monkey vs. 11 Java Chip. Yeech. I know this is, like, the fourth best-selling flavor on the Ben & Jerry's roster, but I hate bananas in any form or flavor and I love coffee ice cream. I'm giving it to Java Chip (especially Starbucks's version), but I think the popularity of CM will trounce it.

3 Salted caramel vs. 14 Mexican chocolate. Talk about hitting me where I live! The first time I had a big dollop of salted caramel, I thought I had died. A perfect combo of salty and sweet that is way better than chocolate-covered pretzels. Meanwhile, the cinnamon and cayenne added to Mexi-chocolate is no snooze on the cone, either. This is a toughie, but I'll call it for salted caramel.

7 French vanilla vs. 10 pumpkin. Ah, can pumpkin pie flavors ever reach their full flavor potential without a complementary scoop of vanilla? This is a brother-against-brother to be sure. I'm not one of those benighted folks who damns vanilla as "boring." In fact, I judge any ice cream brand by the quality of its vanilla the same way I judge a Vietnamese restaurant by its Imperial Rolls. I yearn for both these flavors, but I think squash-phobes will throw everything in for French vanilla.

2 Chocolate vs. 15 green tea. Lord, these more esoteric flavors are going to take a beating in this round. I like green tea a heck of a lot -- especially when I get it free for spending way too much money at sushi joint -- but I think the peeps are going to go for chocolate.