No matter what time of year it is, an ice-cream always sounds like a good idea. The frozen treat is the favourite indulgence of many - irrespective of age.
According to culinary history, ice-cream dates back to the second century B.C. Alexander the Great of Greece liked snow and ice flavoured with honey and nectar. And Emperor Nero of Rome enjoyed snow flavoured with fruits and juices. More than a 1,000 years later, Marco Polo brought a sherbet-like recipe to Italy from the Far East that eventually evolved into ice-cream as most of us know it today.
History apart, eating ice cream is a fun and physical experience. The first bite always shocks and wakes you up with its coldness. And then comes the tending, the caring… to make sure it doesn't melt and drip.
The earliest forms of ice-cream were snow or ice flavoured with fruit juice. (Image: Slashio/Unsplash)
Lately this most delicious cold dessert has been the ground for some crazy food experiments. The latest one that had the Internet aghast was coriander ice-cream served at McDonald’s in China. The limited-edition coriander sundae has a coriander sauce and is also topped with chopped coriander leaves.
Coriander is mostly used as a garnish in Indian cooking. The fact that it was used to create this ice-cream did not go down well with Twitter users. While some people found the idea of a coriander sundae quite appalling, others didn't mind trying the newest flavour.
Coriander, of course, is one of those flavours you either love or hate. There's science to show that to some people, coriander genuinely tastes like soap. So, we get why the Internet was divided on this one. But coriander isn't the only strange flavour out there - even after you've accounted for Heston Blumenthal's savoury ice-creams (bacon and egg ice-cream, anyone? Or cheese toast ice-cream?).
Strange but real ice cream flavours
No matter where you go in the world, you can probably find an ice-cream shop with some oddball flavours.
One of the choices at Kolkata’s famous ice-cream makers Tulika's Ice Cream is the chandan (sandalwood) ice-cream. They also make a paan ice cream with Kolkata meetha paan, which has 17 ingredients. It also has mulethi, a herb commonly used as a cough remedy.
If you’re okay messing with your pani puri (I am not), Apsara Ice cream has a pani puri ice cream. The tart and spicy scoop is stuffed with savoury boondis and served with crushed puris as topping.
There's more.
Remember the masala dosa ice-cream? An eatery in Delhi beat the dosa with some vanilla ice-cream before piling a mound of spicy potato masala on it and serving it with real coconut chutney.
The latest to join the club of weirdest ice cream experiments in the capital is the momo ice-cream. A street vendor in Delhi has been smashing steamed momos and mixing them together with flavored milk and topping them with vanilla ice-cream. To add insult to injury, the momo-ice-cream mix gets a few lashing of the fiery chilli chutney. The bizarre food video has left everybody nauseous.
Food crimes against ice creams
America is not far behind in crazy ice-cream adventures.
Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream in Columbia, Missouri, stirred up a hornet’s nest when it made an ice-cream with cicadas. To prepare the treat, employees collected the cicadas in their backyards. After removing most of the wings (some wings were left on as a garnish for the top layer of the ice-cream) and legs, the bugs were fully cooked in boiling water and covered in brown sugar and milk chocolate. The insects were then mixed in with a base ice-cream flavour of brown sugar and butter. And guess what? People loved it, even if just for the oddity of it all. Thankfully (for the cicadas), the ice-cream was officially ‘bugged’ out by health officials.
Less deviant is the pizza-flavoured ice-cream with tomato, basil, oregano, salt, and garlic at Little Baby’s Ice Cream in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You’ll definitely want to eat this pizza cold!
In 2011, a man named Matt O’Connor started making novelty “Baby Gaga” ice-cream out of donated breast milk at his pop-up shop Icecreamists? The ice-cream had breast milk blended with Madagascan vanilla pods and lemon zest.
Breast milk ice-cream by The Icecreamists
But the award for the most daring ice-cream has to go to the one served at Sunni Sky’s Homemade Ice Cream in Angier, North Carolina. This ice-cream requires you to sign a waiver before you purchase it. It's made with some of the hottest chillies and loads of chilli sauce.
Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium in Bar Harbor, Maine has been serving vanilla scoops churned with real lobster meat since 1988. Not everyone enjoys the combination of ice-cream with fresh lobster folded into each bite but plenty of patrons describe lobster and ice cream as pairing pretty well: The creamy vanilla matches the buttery lobster (which repudiates the belief that seafood and dairy should not mix). As for me I have my own preferred methods for eating lobster. And it’s usually not in ice cream.
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