A correct and definitive ranking of It’s-It flavors

It's It It's It Photo: Stephanie Wright Hession / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Stephanie Wright Hession / Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close A correct and definitive ranking of It’s-It flavors 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

San Francisco has many hallowed food traditions, from sourdough and Dutch Crunch to Pink Popcorn and Rice-A-Roni. As my colleague Peter Hartlaub points out in his latest Big Event podcast, the It’s-It — a beautiful ice-cream sandwich composition of oatmeal cookies and chocolate coating — has earned a particular kind of unofficial sainthood in San Francisco.

So, since we’re all in need of an occasional distraction from the current news cycle, it only made sense to dedicate an entire podcast to the It’s-It. As part of our ode to the It’s-It, which includes Chronicle restaurant reporter Justin Phillips performing a live taste test, we also ranked the seven current flavors (the Cliff’s Notes version is below). Even though this hierarchy is clearly unassailable and surely immaculate, please do share your thoughts on the best and worst It’s-It flavors.

7. Pumpkin

The act of consuming a Pumpkin It’s-It is a perfect microcosm of the whole pumpkin spice situation we have going on in America during the autumnal months. It starts out fine, even good. You have your first taste and you’re hit with a rich cornucopia of autumnal flavors. Fall is arrived! A rush of memories floods through your system — new school supplies, turning of the leaves, Halloween.

But after that first taste, it’s all diminishing returns. Just like the actual pumpkin spice experience, the overload hits and it then gets worse and much worse. The second taste is still OK, yet not as good, a bit tired. The third is a little too rich and cloying. By the fourth, you start to notice the artifice of it all. Let it be known: Pumpkin is objectively the worst It’s-It flavor.

6. Green Tea

Green Tea is the relative newcomer to the It’s-It lineup, the raison d’être of this totally meaningful exercise. To be sure, green tea ice cream is generally delicious and nothing new. However, the problem with the Green Tea It’s-It is that it’s too on-trend and feels forced, as if deigned from a corporate tower somewhere. Worse than that, though, is that matcha popularity is not only surging in the food world, but it’s corporate-trending. It’s been Starbucksified and infused into vodka.

Do you remember Poochie? On “The Simpsons,” Poochie was a cartoon dog introduced on the “Itchy & Scratchy Show” as part of an effort to appeal to a younger demographic; however, the effort was so obviously engineered by suits that Poochie was quickly killed off. The Green Tea It’s-It is the Poochie of our era; it feels like we’re one step away from Peppermint Mocha as the next flavor.

5. Cappuccino

The Cappuccino variation has a strong following, and I respect that so many people love this flavor. My issue is more with coffee ice cream in general. A quick detour to explain: Andrew Barnett is a very smart man. He is the coffee guru behind Linea Coffee, a very nice coffee shop and cafe in the Mission. He once pointed out that America loves Starbucks not because America likes the flavor of coffee, but because America loves the sugar and cream that mask Starbucks’ subpar coffee. I drink coffee every morning. I drink it black because I like the bitter taste of coffee. I do not like most coffee ice creams because they are too sweet and do not taste like coffee. Would you drink a Frappuccino with some oatmeal cookies and chocolate bars?

Photo: Eric Luse San Francisco’s famous It’s-It ice cream sandwich gets a...

4. Chocolate

And thus we move into the contenders. The classics. The heavyweights. The ones that are actually good and can make valid claims to the throne. There is nothing bad to say about chocolate ice cream, and just how pizza and doughnuts are almost always good even when they’re bad, there is almost no such thing as a crummy chocolate ice cream. And the It’s-It version is perfectly delicious — malty, sweet, milky, that classic chocolate flavor.

3. Strawberry

Mr. Hartlaub is down on Strawberry, and you can talk me into flipping Chocolate and Strawberry. But I’d argue that Strawberry has a higher ceiling than Chocolate. When you want it, you want it, especially on warm summer days. The flip side is that it also has a lower floor — nobody wants Strawberry during foggy or winter days, so maybe its current position may be inflated due to the fact that this exercise is occurring during a heat wave.

Photo: It's It It's It Ice Cream Sandiwiches

2. Vanilla

I’m a minimalist when it comes to food. I like margherita pizzas, nigiri and single-patty cheeseburgers at In-N-Out. There’s a certain elegance in simplicity done well. For years, I insisted Vanilla It’s-Its to be the best flavor. There’s nothing like its interplay with the chocolate and oatmeal. Vanilla It’s-Its are perfect, almost as perfect as ...

1. Mint

Upon much reflection, conversation and deliberation, Mint It’s-It takes the title. It’s wonderfully balanced in its sweetness and textures, but at the end of the day, it was the emotional side that clinched it. For me, mint ice cream — bright green in all its Shrek-like vibrance — represented the first special ice cream. By and large, the Neapolitan ice cream flavors were generally the most ubiquitous flavors in my childhood. Maybe not everyone will agree, and that’s fine, but for my own purview, at least, mint ice cream harkens to that treasured trip to the ice cream shop when a whole new palate of ice cream flavors was opened up beyond the supermarket aisle, a feeling I still associate with those little Baskin-Robbins helmets. Mint ice cream was, and remains, a special-occasion ice cream.

Paolo Lucchesi is the food editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: plucchesi@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @lucchesi