Recently, I was at my friend’s sister’s house visiting her 11-day-old baby. After tucking the infant away, she and her exhausted husband DoorDashed McFlurries, which I interpreted as a desperate act of survival. They asked if I wanted one. I said no. I hadn’t had a McFlurry in 20 years and I figured that, like many things I loved from McDonald’s as a child, I would probably now find it gross.
But when the McFlurries arrived, I stared into the maw of the cup and realized that I really did want whatever was in there. My friend’s sister generously offered me a portion, so I took it—literally from the mouths of two beleaguered new parents—and I’m not sorry about it at all, because tasting that McFlurry has inflamed an ecstatic passion within me. A McFlurry is the platonic ideal of a dessert. And it only costs $2.99.
The remarkable thing about the McFlurry is the unrivaled intensity of the vanilla in its soft serve. It’s otherworldly. It is like frozen vanilla paste. There’s also a generous heaping of Oreo, which reliably maintains its crunch. I am an evangelist of the mini McFlurry (which is really all the dessert one could want), but it also comes in a larger size for just $4.99. In an inflationary hell-spiral of $12 ice cream cones, on a planet careening towards heat extinction, a McFlurry is pretty difficult to beat.
But I wanted to survey the other options, to be sure that the McFlurry is truly the gold standard of Oreo ice cream desserts. Results below.
Dairy Queen
Cost before tax: $5.49
A mini Blizzard turns out to be more expensive than a McFlurry and is basically just vanilla ice cream. There’s far less Oreo, and the Oreos are essentially pulverized to dust, which makes them tough to taste. Also, the vanilla doesn’t pop. On the bright side, the Blizzard was cold, it came with an extravagantly long spoon, and it’s kind of exciting when the employees turn the cups upside down. Dairy Queen’s menu is robust and complex: a cone dipped in the dust of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a Blizzard with the enticing flavor of “Mexican-style Hot Chocolate Made With Abuelita.” But the Oreo Blizzard was disappointing. I thought it would be competitive with McDonald’s, but it’s not.
Thomas Sweet
Cost with tax: $11.53 for a small
The Thomas Sweet “Blend-In” (Oreo ice cream base, Oreo mix-ins) had an excruciatingly intense Oreo flavor—heavy on the cocoa, light on the vanilla. The taste was pretty good, but the insurmountable issue here is that the Oreos were ground to a pulp. There were no discernible pieces of Oreo. The dessert had the consistency of wet sand. When I Googled “Thomas Sweet Blend-In,” the AI overview informed me that the shop is “famous for using a heavy-duty machine resembling a power drill” to fabricate its Blend-Ins. It tastes that way: unpleasantly gritty. I threw most of it away and felt heavy as I trudged to the car.
Dave’s Hot Chicken
Cost before tax: $6.49 for a small
The “Oreo Top-loaded Shake” is absolutely riddled with problems. Inside the cup, one finds enormous cookie chunks floating atop a milk-adjacent liquid. These chunks are simply too big (probably one fifth of a cookie each) and the ice cream is soupy. This dessert is hostile to the act of consumption, because the chunks clog the straw, but the ice cream is too liquid for the small plastic spoon. How was I supposed to eat this? What does Dave’s Hot Chicken think they’re doing? Also, the Oreos immediately got soggy, and I couldn’t figure out what the ice cream tasted like. Did not finish. Bad.
Surfside
Cost with tax: $9.85
Of all the surveyed desserts, the Cyclone from Surfside is the best non-McDonalds option. Unlike McDonalds—which simply sprinkles the crushed Oreos on top—Surfside blends the cookies into the ice cream and then also uses them as a topping. The consistency of the ice cream is neither too hard nor too soft, and the texture doesn’t have the unpleasant sandiness of Thomas Sweet. But the Cyclone lacks the psychedelic vanilla of the McFlurry: The ice cream is bland and tastes too much like cream. It coats the tongue unpleasantly. It comes in an orange plastic keepsake cup, which I unfortunately did not want to keep. While I ate my Cyclone outside the Tenleytown location, I longingly eyed the McDonald’s across the street.
The Dairy Godmother
Cost with tax: $8.00 for a small
At the Dairy Godmother in Del Ray, I ordered a cup of frozen vanilla custard with Oreo topping. (I asked for the closest thing to a McFlurry. The teen behind the counter said “What’s a McFlurry?”) The dessert I received was fully hidden beneath a moss of pulverized Oreos—Oreos that were, as my friend pointed out, pulped to the odd consistency of coffee grounds. Something McDonald’s does right is letting the crushed Oreos take whatever shape and size they please. There’s textural variety. Not at Dairy Godmother, where the texture is boring and the teeny cookie crumbs quickly lose their crisp, if they ever had it to begin with. Once I unearthed the frozen custard beneath the Oreos, I was disappointed to realize that it’s flavorless. It’s almost watery tasting when you really sit with it on your tongue. Vanilla ice cream doesn’t have to be this way. (See: McDonald’s.)
Cold Stone
Cost with tax: $9.78
Asked about the closest equivalent to the McFlurry, an employee steered me towards a menu of “Signature Creations” that included “Oreo Overload” and “Oreo Pretzel Perfection” and “Cookies Make Everything Batter.” But these came in waffle cone bowls and were adulterated with various toppings such as fudge and chocolate chips, so I just got the “Oreo Crème” ice cream with Oreo topping instead. It was exciting to watch them make it. The employee plopped the ice cream and Oreos onto a literal cold stone surface and then used a bench scraper to blend them. But in the end, there was not a lot of flavor to the ice cream and it was too thick—almost gummy. It must have a weird additive, I thought, like lecithin or xanthan gum. And the Oreo chunks were simply too big. The biggest one was literally half of an Oreo. Wrong cookie texture, bad flavor, a strange gummy stringiness to the ice cream—simply not a good dessert.
Shake Shack
Cost before tax: $8.19
I went to Shake Shack for an Oreo Concrete, but I found that it’s no longer on offer, at least at the Dupont location. The closest thing to a McFlurry was an Oreo shake—and while a milkshake is nothing like a McFlurry, I’m giving it an honorable mention because it was excellent: perceptible chunks of Oreo, thin enough ice cream to drink from a straw that never once got choked with cookie bits. Drawbacks: It wasn’t that cold, and it does not have the fun paper packaging of the McFlurry or its exquisite vanilla pop. Also, it’s less satisfying to drink a dessert than to eat it.
McDonald’s
I understand that I am telling you something counterintuitive: that a $2.99 mini McFlurry from McDonald’s is superior to all its more expensive corporate competitors and also to the homespun offerings of various beloved local institutions. I take no pleasure in reporting this, although I’m now convinced that it’s true. To double check my intuitions, I took a trip to the Del Ray McDonald’s with Washingtonian food writer Ike Allen.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever had any soft serve that’s better than McDonald’s soft serve,” he told me, sincerely, after eating a pillowy scoop of McFlurry. There’s a plateau with soft serve, he explained; with regular ice cream, venturing somewhere upscale is often worth the hassle, “but soft serve only gets so good. It tends to get worse the fancier you make it.”
I asked him about the Oreo pieces: Were there enough of them? Should they be mixed in? We came to the conclusion that they shouldn’t. With a hardier topping, like M&Ms or Heath bars, folding them into the ice cream makes sense. But Oreos are fragile and tender. They crumble. They do not stand up to blending—and they also quickly grow soggy—so they’re therefore best left on top. And furthermore, the vanilla soft serve is just so good that you don’t mind when all the Oreo topping is gone and you’re left with a gorgeous little box of ice cream awaiting an encounter with the tongue.
This brings me to the McDonald’s vanilla flavor, which Ike agreed is unique. And he explained something to me that I had not previously understood: one must aggressively flavor cold foods in a way that hot foods do not require, because cold desensitizes the taste buds. Perhaps that accounts for the epidemic of flavorless ice cream that I’ve recently sampled across Virginia, Maryland, and DC.
“I feel like we’re learning a harsh lesson about McFlurries, which is that nobody does it better,” Ike told me, spoon in hand. “This is really great. I just can’t find fault in it.”
