25 Ice Cream Flavors You Won’t Believe Exist
Chocolate and vanilla are so passé. These days, ice cream shops are delving into far more adventurous flavor territory. Here are 25 of the weirdest ice cream flavors you can try today:
1. LOBSTER
You can get a lot of odd lobster products in New England, not least lobster-laced desserts. Ben and Bill’s Chocolate Emporium, a line of sweets shops in Maine and Massachusetts, began serving lobster ice cream as a way to prove to their customers that their ice creams were really made in-house. The butter-flavored ice cream is blended with chopped bits of cooked lobster meat. You can buy it by the bucket, and yes, they ship.
2. POTATO CHIPS AND CAP'N CRUNCH
At Beenie’s Ice Cream in Morristown, New Jersey, you can satisfy your cravings for salty, sweet, and children’s cereal all at once. "Midnight Snack" is a flavor that combines vanilla ice cream with chocolate-covered potato chips and Cap’n Crunch pieces. Note: The shop, which is named after the owner’s dog, is very pup-friendly.
3. ALMOND CHARCOAL
Little Damage in Los Angeles is an ice cream shop with a goth soul. It colors its house-made cones and ice creams with activated charcoal, resulting in flavors like Almond Charcoal and Black Roses. Mmm, tastes like darkness.
4. SQUID INK
Ikasumi, or squid ink, is a sought-after ice cream flavor in Japan. If you can’t make it to Tokyo, you can make your own with wasabi sprinkles. It’s a little briny and a lot photogenic. Squid ink is becoming a hot trend in cocktails and food, though, so squid ink desserts could become a lot more common in the U.S. soon.
5. PROSCIUTTO
Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco is known for its incredibly innovative flavors, some of which tend toward the meaty. The pink ice cream, made with the help of the local pork supplier Boccalone, sold so fast the first time it appeared on the menu in 2011 that the shop immediately decided to whip up some more for the next weekend. It’s been on rotation ever since.
6. ABSINTHE PISTACHIO
At Prague’s Absintherie Bar and Museum, you can try 60 different kinds of absinthe, and not all of them in cocktail form. The bar also serves up an ice cream made with its eponymous spirit. During the summer, you can grab a very green pistachio-and-absinthe ice cream cone for less than $2.
7. JUNIPER & LEMON CURD
Inspired by the late American writer James Thurber, this flavor by Jeni’s ice cream is designed to taste like a martini with a twist. It’s got cool juniper berry notes with a little zing from the lemon curd.
8. YAM
The purple yam Ube is a popular dessert ingredient in the Philippines and Hawaii. The tuber-flavored ice cream makes for a subtle, addictive flavor. You can buy Purple Yam ice cream at the grocery store from Magnolia, which makes a host of tropical-flavored ice creams. Oh, and it’s very Instagram-friendly.
9. CORN ON THE COB
Ice cream and corn-on-the-cob are both must-have summer treats, so it makes sense to just combine them. Cronut inventor Dominque Ansel’s Creme de la Corn dessert, available at the chef’s Tokyo bakery for summer 2017, is caramel sweet corn soft serve served on grilled corn on the cob brushed with butter and soy sauce.
10. PIG’S BLOOD & KOJI
Blood sausage? Meet blood ice cream. Blood can be used as a substitute for eggs in recipes, and in 2014, the expert chefs at the nonprofit Nordic Food Lab developed a recipe for blood ice cream using koji, a fermented barley, instead of cocoa for flavor. But if you do have chocolate, it’s a classic pairing for pig’s blood, used in Italian desserts like sanguinaccio dolce.
11. CARIBOU FAT
Traditionally, "eskimo ice cream," or akutaq, is made with caribou or another animal fat that’s whipped up with berries. These days, some substitute in Crisco, and it can also be made savory by mixing in ground meat instead of berries. Either way, it’s a frothy dessert that has been a favorite in Alaska for centuries. The recipes vary from family to family and place to place, so you should probably try a lot of it.
12. MUSHROOMS
Coolhaus’s Candy Cap Mushroom ice cream has hints of maple, vanilla, and naturally, earthy mushroom. It’s made by soaking sweet Candy Cap mushrooms in the Coolhaus ice cream base to achieve a potent, foresty taste.
13. CARROT GINGER
Carrot ginger ice cream is like eating a very creamy smoothie. At Sweet Action Ice Cream in Denver, it’s made with real carrot juice and fresh-grated ginger to give it a little zing. You're welcome to pretend it's part of your juice cleanse.
14. GARLIC
Garlic ice cream is a must-have at the annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. At The Stinking Rose, an L.A.- and San Francisco-based restaurant where the motto is "we season our garlic with food," you can top off your meal with Gilroy garlic ice cream drizzled with caramel mole sauce. Or you can make your own garlic-tastic ice cream at home.
15. BURNT SAGE
Morgenstern’s in New York City recently debuted Burnt Sage, an herby ice cream made with sage that has been charred over an open flame then soaked in cream. The savory delicacy is then dipped in chocolate.
16. RANCH DRESSING
Little Baby’s Ice Cream in Philadelphia debuted its Ranch ice cream in 2015, and it’s now on steady rotation. The ice cream base is loaded up with buttermilk, garlic, chives, and dill to give it that cool salad taste.
17. BEET GREENS
The Portland-based shop Salt & Straw is turning beets into summertime treats. Previously, Salt & Straw's Los Angeles outpost used discarded beet greens to create Top of the Beet, a beet jam and beet-leaf sugar brittle flavor. In August 2017, the Portland store is debuting Aquabeet, a bright pink flavor that combines locally grown beets with Aquavit, the Scandinavian-style spirit.
18. GRAPE NUTS
New Englanders sing the praises of Grape-Nuts-laced ice cream, a regional specialty. The Grape-Nuts (a wheat and barley breakfast staple) are blended into vanilla ice cream, creating a delicious dessert you can justify as being at least somewhat fibrous. Try it at Grass Roots Creamery in Granby, Connecticut.
19. EARL GREY SRIRACHA
If you’re a Sriracha addict, it’s not difficult to get your favorite hot sauce onto your dessert spoon. At Glacé Ice Cream in Kansas City, they mix Sriracha with the cool bergamot of Earl Grey tea to create an ice cream that’s a perfect mix of sweet, creamy, and spicy.
20. CHEDDAR CHEESE
If you’re going to eat your apple pie with ice cream and cheddar cheese, you might as well just eat it with cheddar cheese ice cream. That’s what Joy Williams, the pastry chef at Wednesday’s Pie in Denver, was thinking when she began testing out her frozen cheese dessert. She ended up using a cheddar cheese powder instead of fresh cheese to retain the smooth texture of the ice cream, but the bright orange dessert was still a huge hit. You can keep an eye out for the off-menu special on the shop’s Instagram page.
21. MISO
OddFellows Ice Cream in New York City has come up with 200 wacky and original flavors since it opened its first location in 2013, and they haven’t shied away from using miso, the popular Japanese soy paste. Recently, they’ve had a Miso Peanut Butter scoop on rotation, but they’ve also whipped up a flavor called Miso Cherry in the past, both combining the salty, earthy flavor of miso with more traditional dessert tastes. If you want to make your own miso ice cream, most recipes suggest using white miso, a more subtle variety that pairs well with fruits, caramel, and more.
22. GOAT CHEESE CASHEW CARAMEL
Black Dog Gelato in Chicago is famous for its goat cheese-cashew-caramel ice cream, which is the only flavor on the rotating menu that you’re guaranteed to find every time you visit. The goat cheese gives it a flavor similar to a cheesecake, and the sweet-savory combo is a huge hit.
23. LOX
At Max and Mina’s Ice Cream in Queens, ice cream is an appropriate brunch food. Their lox flavor consists of vanilla ice cream mixed with bits of Nova smoked salmon, cream cheese, and salt for that perfect bagel-and-lox taste.
24. KALE LIME
Kale lime leaf: healthy salad or delicious dessert? At Frankie & Jo’s in Seattle, it’s definitely the latter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shop is all vegan, and the kale-flavored ice cream is made with coconut oil and cocoa butter rather than dairy.
25. KETCHUP AND MAYO
Freezer Burn PH in Manila is known for its odd flavors (including lemon chicken and corn-and-cheese) but perhaps the weirdest ice cream it has offered is ketchup and mayo, a combo that’s apparently as good in a cold dessert as it is on a burger. If that sounds too weird for you on its own, don’t worry—the shop also sells sides of fries to dip in it.
Article Source: http://mentalfloss.com/article/502421/25-ice-cream-flavors-you-won%E2%80%99t-believe-exist
Image Source: http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/width-constrained-728/public/JulieK.jpg
VOCABULARY WORDS:
1. Passé (adj.) ~ no longer fashionable out of date
2. Briny (adj.) ~ of salty water or the sea salty
3. Eponymous (adj.) ~ (of a person) giving their name to something
4. Frothy (adj.) ~ light and entertaining but of little substance
5. Zing (n.) ~ a quality or characteristic that excites the interest, enthusiasm, etc.
6. Delicacy (n.) ~ a choice or expensive food
7. Fibrous (adj.) ~ consisting of or characterized by fibers
8. Earthy (adj.) ~ suggesting earth or soil in texture, odor, color, etc.
9. Lox (n.) ~ kind of brine-cured salmon, having either a salt cure (Scandinavian lox) or a sugar cure (Nova Scotia lox) often eaten with cream cheese on a bagel
10. Retain (v.) ~ continue to have (something) keep possession of
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What is you favorite ice cream flavor?
2. Have you ever tried any "weird-flavored" ice cream? If yes, what flavor was it and how did it taste? If no, which of the flavors mentioned above would you be willing to?
3. Are there any special and unique flavors of ice cream in Korea? Give some examples.
4. If you could create your own ice cream, what ingredients are you going to put together and why would you mix them?
