I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! July 1st marks National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day, a day to sample or wonder about the awkward or just plain silly kinds of ice cream flavors. It is meant for more than the love of the traditional vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream.
Mitchell’s Ice Cream in downtown Cleveland is known to mix up some seasonal flavors that to some might seem funky and to others are well worth the wait. Their salted butter sweet corn layers the flavors on your tongue making you wonder why every bothered trying to pick the perfect cob in the first place. And their jalapeno strawberry has just the right combo of heat and sweet.
Another great shop churning out wacky flavors is Ample Hills Creamery in New York City. With two locations plus season kiosks, they are sure to satisfy some flavor-seeking tastebuds.
From the savory and smokey to the sweet and surprising, LICK Pure Cream in Seattle offers curiosity and thrill seekers a chance to test those boundaries, too. Flavors like pork-belly pecan can’t go wrong, right?
The selection of available flavors boggles the mind and often stretches the bounds of believability. From fish flavored varieties to ice cream made from goat’s milk, the options for satisfying your ice cream craving seem endless. Haagen-Daz announces new flavors and types of ice cream every year, and there are many local boutique ice cream shops with their own unique flavors. Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day celebrates all the crazy flavors that have been invented over the years and even those which have yet to come to light!
Ice Cream Facts:
- Ice cream as we know it seems to have emerged in 17th-century France. (A first-century Roman emperor is said to have sent runners into the mountains for snow to be flavored with juices. In the 13th century.
- Marco Polo brought back from China descriptions of a sherbet dessert.
- The cone didn’t appear until 1904, when a Syrian waffle maker at the St. Louis World’s Fair began rolling his pastries into horns to help an ice cream vendor who had run out of dishes.
- The idea of the ice cream cone had been patented a year earlier, in 1903, by an Italian in New York City, but the fair popularized it.
- Today the average American eats about 20 quarts of ice cream a year―the world’s highest per capita consumption, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.
- Top-selling ice cream flavors are: vanilla, with 33 percent of the market, and chocolate, with 19 percent.
- Some weird flavors of ice cream include buckwheat ice cream, beer flavored ice cream, and parmesan gelato.
- 87% of Americans have ice cream in their freezer at any given time.
- It takes about 50 licks to finish a single scoop ice cream cone.
- Ice cream became available to the general population in France in 1660.
- Americans celebrated the victory of WWII with ice cream. In 1946, they ate more than 20 quarts of ice cream per person.
- Hawaii has a fruit known as the ice cream bean or the monkey tamarind that actually tastes like vanilla ice cream!
- There is actually an ice cream diet designed for weight loss. You can read all about it in Prevention Magazine’s paperback, The Ice Cream Diet
- 19% of Americans say they eat ice cream in bed. 3% eat ice cream in the bathtub.
- Howard Hughes, the millionaire, was fond of Baskin-Robbins’ Banana Ripple ice cream. His ‘helpers’ had to order 200 gallons from the factory before it was discontinued. A few days later Hughes announced that he didn’t like it anymore.
- Hawaiian Punch was originally an ice cream topping.
- Eskimo Ice Cream (Akutaq) is made by using a concoction of reindeer fat, seal oil, freshly fallen snow or water, fresh berries and sometimes ground fish. Air is whipped by hand until it cools into foam. Akutaq can also be made with moose, or polar bear meat or fat.
- “Raw Horse Flesh” is an ice cream flavor that is sold in Japan.
- Around 1800, insulated ice houses were invented and ice cream became an American industry.
- Philadelphia native Nancy Johnson patented the first-hand crank churn to make ice cream in 1843, the churn was much faster and produced creamier ice cream than using ice in a bowl, as people had done before.
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