For fans of Bay Area rap legend E-40, it was only a matter of time before the beast with the mouthpiece turned “Goon with a Spoon” into a brand. It’s a phrase E-40 has spit in songs before like “I Get Down,” and “Back in Business,” the latter of which featured this incredible bar “A goon with the spoon, wrist game sick. Paid the neighborhood chef to teach a n*gga how to whip, a fixture how to mix, counterclockwise twisting’ it, drop it off, deliver it.”
That line, it turns out, is actually pretty literal. E-40 is no stranger to the kitchen, he taught himself to cook from an early age while his mom balanced three jobs and even landed a position at a high-end restaurant where he picked up some culinary skills. So when last year we heard that E-40, fully in the elder mogul phase of his career, would be launching a food brand called Goon With The Spoon, we knew it was going to be a good fit.
The brand launched with sausages and burritos under its name, but now E-40, like Chance the Rapper and Selena Gomez, is taking on the world of ice cream offering six flavors that were apparently four years in the making and are produced sustainability using solar power and dairy from non-growth hormone-treated cows.
Good practices aside, how does this stuff taste? Is this just another celebrity-branded cash grab or does E-40 truly know his shit? We’re about to find out in our review and ranking of all six Goon With The Spoon flavors.
Vanilla Bean
Good news, all of the Goon With The Spoon flavors are solid. Each flavor is creamy, flavorful, and can hold its own against any of the top-shelf brands you’ll find at the grocery store. This includes this Vanilla Bean flavor but we have to rank it last because in the Goon With The Spoon lineup, this is the obvious weakest link.
It’s just not very imaginative, while E-40 didn’t exactly go the Baskin Robbins route here and give us any weird stunt flavors, all of the flavors bring something at the very least interesting to the table. But not vanilla bean, this is just standard vanilla ice cream.
It’s rich, creamy, and a bit floral, with speckles of vanilla throughout the white cream base.
The Bottom Line:
It’s good but totally inessential. Not many actual beans to be seen, either.
Strawberry
Bits of strawberry are strewn throughout in this fresh berry-forward flavor. It’s not candy sweet like some strawberry ice creams, instead, this focuses on creamier flavors, giving it a strawberry milkshake vibe that is just begging to be blended.
Every bite features small granules of actual strawberry, in addition to chunks of more substantial berries, providing some nice texture to each spoonful.
The Bottom Line:
Refreshing, textural, a solid 5/5 strawberry ice cream.
Salted Caramel
I love this flavor! The base this flavor is built upon here is vanilla, but unlike the vanilla bean flavor, this has interesting caramelized butterscotch notes, with hints of brown sugar, and ribbons of sweet caramel throughout. It’s one of my favorites in the whole line, so why is it chilling in the middle of the list and not in the top three? Because it feels like it’s not delivering on its promise.
The flavor here is “Salted Caramel,” and I’m just not even getting the slightest hint of salt here. I thought maybe the extra salt was in the caramel itself so I spooned out a ribbon and I’m not getting a single trace of salt. As much as I like this flavor, if what you’re after is that salty-sweet flavor profile, this doesn’t have that.
The Bottom Line:
Delicious, but perhaps “Caramel” or even “Butterscotch” is a more apt name than “Salted Caramel.”
Mint Chocolate Chip
There are pretty much two ways to do mint chocolate chip ice cream. You can infuse a minty and creamy ice cream base with shavings of dark chocolate, allowing for a balanced ratio of fresh mint flavor and chocolate with every spoonful, or you can throw large chunks of chocolate throughout the base, allowing each bite to have a different ratio of mint and dark chocolate flavors.
Goon With The Spoon took the latter approach, and while I like consistency, I actually appreciate the lack of chocolate here — it allows this very refreshing mint base to shine. I found myself savoring each spoonful of this flavor, allowing the ice cream to melt in my mouth until I was left with hard shards of rich dark chocolate that perfectly matched the experience of eating an Andes Mint.
The Bottom Line:
An Andes Mint in ice cream form. Refreshing mint dominates each spoonful followed by a rich dark chocolate finish.
Bourbon Vanilla
When I complained that Goon With The Spoon’s Vanilla Bean flavor was unimaginative, it was because I expected a twist on the classic flavor more in line with this delicious Bourbon Vanilla. This flavor has whispers of oaky bourbon and notes of vanilla that when combined taste like a very rich and luxurious banana ice cream. That might sound like a shock but there is a noticeable sweet banana quality to this with top notes of honey.
This would be my go-to flavor if I were making a banana split, chocolate sauce, crushed nuts, and some whipped cream would give this flavor an even more luxurious gourmet quality.
The Bottom Line:
Rich, creamy, comforting, a slightly tropical with banana and honey notes over a sweet vanilla and bourbon base.
Cookie Dough
In general, I’m not the biggest fan of Cookie Dough ice cream. I love chocolate chip ice cream, and I love cookie dough, but something about the union of the two just fails to deliver to my expectations. That is, until I had Goon With The Spoon.
Generally, Cookie Dough ice cream is made with a vanilla base peppered with chocolate chips and the occasional ball of delicious cookie dough. But in most cases, each of those ingredients is bottom of the barrel. It’s never Vanilla Bean or French Vanilla, it’s never the same chocolate chips found in actual chocolate chip ice cream, so you pretty much eat it as a socially acceptable delivery device for cookie dough. That’s not the case for this Goon With The Spoon Flavor.
It mixes up the formula by providing tiny bites of chocolate cookie dough throughout a creamy base, giving you what you want — cookie dough in every bite — over a vanilla cream base. The use of chocolate cookie dough over the usual chocolate chip dough infuses richer chocolate notes into this flavor and manages to deliver the best of both cookie dough ice cream and cookies and cream, making this a sort of hybrid flavor that is so good we’re surprised it isn’t more common.
The Bottom Line:
A cookie dough ice cream that actually delivers on the cookie dough.
Shop Goon With The Spoon products here.