OddFelllows – Carrot Cheesecake Sandwich

With Cornflakes and a Caramel Drizzle on a Brioche Bun

So for those you who remember the rasperberry peppercorn review, OddFellows is kind of a hole in the wall ice cream shop, in that the space of this Manhattan ice cream shop is about the size of a single hole in the wall.

But as tiny as the place is, they make some mighty fine ice creams, and even finer ice cream creations. At the moment, I am referring to their intense ice cream sandwiches.

Dissected down the middle, this ice cream sandwich is perfect to share with a friend.

Carrot Cheesecake Profile

Featured to the left is a carrot cheesecake ice cream sandwich with cornflake topping, and a caramel drizzle. And what a doozy this is. To further explain, I’ll need to break this thing down frame by frame as a single bite here stretches out into minutes of explanation in my mind.

Taking that first bite, my mouth meets bread in a warm and comforting moment. The brioche bun is like one of the fluffiest doughnuts you’ll taste in the city. And due to it’s buttery outside, the bread alone is able to stimulate the appetite and while contrasting the soon to come sweetness. This raises the anticipation of the flavors to come to a whole different level.

Moving to the next moment where we actually get into the ice cream, the essential twist of hot to cold hits me. Initially I was totally expecting it, but in the tenth of the a second where I was only experiencing buttery bun, I completely forgot what was coming next, so the cold ice cream caught me by surprise. Like I said, I’ve had many a donut ice cream sandwich before, so I knew what to expect. It’s most closely related to Milk & Cream or After’s ice cream sandwiches. But in the moment of that first bite, for some reason I thought this was somehow superior?

The answer lies within. It’s the carrot cheesecake ice cream flavor. There’s a smooth richness to the carrot cheesecake, and while the carrot isn’t terribly intense, the cream cheese isn’t either. That isn’t to say the ice cream is lacking in flavor my any means. I just mean that when combined in the buttery brioche bun, the ice cream is no longer its own entity. It becomes like an ingredient to a sandwich, and the sandwich becomes a single entity, instead of the components that go into it.

As the final moment of the bite, the whole thing is brought to completion as it’s given extra attention and love from the sweetness of the caramel drizzle. I can’t believe I almost forgot about the caramel drizzle! That sweetness is what you could come to expect from an ice cream creation, and is abundant enough to give you that great sense of sugar, without going overboard and destroying the great savory aspects of butter and cream cheese.

So now we have butter, cream cheese, light carrot zest to season, and then the caramel drizzle adds some much needed sweetness to balance this creation and make you remember it IS in fact ice cream.

For those of you thinking, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” You are not mistaken. And as amazing as this is, to me, even I don’t find it flawless. However, I didn’t want to disrupt the flow of my admiration, so I decided to temporarily omit this one section for a bit. *Sigh. I’m not a fan of the cornflakes… there I said it. They add too much starch taste, their texture consistency just feels out of place with the whole thing, and if they were never on the sandwich, the whole thing would be immensely better.

In the end the whole thing is just a beautiful moment experienced in slow motion so that we can appreciate the small parts that make it up.

Carrot Cheesecake Conclusion

It’s easily a top 5 ice cream sandwich, and in talks for the GOAT for the ice cream sandwich category. The whole thing is fucking incredible. It’s got ample sweetness from the caramel, a little salty-savory from the cream cheese and butter, seasoning from the carrot cinnamon, and starch from the bun to bring the whole thing together. I’ll omit the cornflakes because they were just unnecessary and intrusive throughout the whole thing, but otherwise, even I can’t find a single thing to fault here.

Want to see/devour this majestic mofo yourself? Go to 75 E 4th St, New York City, in the East Village, or at 175 Kent Ave, in Brooklyn.