A tasty cure for the summertime blues
What’s your favourite ice cream flavour? A quick poll I took of Japanese kids revealed banira (vanilla) to be the undisputed champion. Which surprised me. In English slang, after all, vanilla-flavoured has come to mean boring. Anyway, what do kids know. Chocolate is obviously the best flavour.
I didn’t find out about it until it was already over, so alas could not attend, but July and August saw the Ice Cream Expo in Yokohama.
And while all the ordinary fare was on offer, there wouldn’t be much point in an expo if all that was on offer was what you could find down at the supermarket.
But in terms of innovative (weird) flavours, it went far beyond the passé basashi (raw horse meat) and wasabi .
Otaku International has a report with a focus on the more outlandish - octopus, squid, caviar, chicken wings, the foul and dreadful natto, mamushi (the deadly pit viper) (I’ll just repeat that - the deadly pit viper), and the star of the show, ox tongue.
‘Chuwy’ visited the expo and tried a good number of the ice creams on offer, and wrote up his thoughts at the entertaining Chuwy Thoughts.
There are some more photos available in a Mainichi gallery.
am not surprised to hear the unbiased pronouncement that Chocolate is the best flavour, but children also have a definite liking for chewing gum icecream,tutti-frutti icecream,beetroot icecream and anything else that is guaranteed to stain face and clothing and leave their poor parents penniless!!
Sir, you are perfectly welcome to act in-Loco-parentis with my two perfectly behaved children on a trip to the nearest ice-cream parlor ..methinks you will be whistling a new chanson.
*good post overoften*
your mate
rem.
August 12th, 2008 at 5:37 amIn defense of vanilla, it has a very distinctive flavor, and does not deserve its current colloquial abuse. If you need the tutti-fruttis and shiny baubles invented by soulless ice cream barons, then you may as well go all the way, and drink coffee in a Mickey Mouse mug and drive a Kitty car.
In another lifetime, I once surveyed several dominatrix’s, part of a community who refer anything non-SM as vanilla. Funny enough, they all liked vanilla ice cream.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:52 amany info on what the fellatrix’s liked?.
rem
August 12th, 2008 at 9:33 amoh god, not natto!
August 12th, 2008 at 9:40 amGhoti, in fairness to the abusers of vanilla, if they, like me, grew up in 1970s Britain, then the sort of vanilla ‘flavoured’ fare on offer then was as good as flavourless. It’s improved recently, but was for ages unencumbered by anything that had ever been close to a vanilla pod.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:51 amI also used to turn my nose up at vanilla as being too plain, but recently have developed quite a taste (actually, too much of a taste) for the Japanese “Super Cup” vanilla (by Meiji).
August 12th, 2008 at 10:51 amwell I originally went looking for something to do with “History of Ice Cream in Japan” or “Mochi from the Beginning!”…
and turned this up - “Ice Cream at a Molecular Level”
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery/benandjerry/icecream.html
(dunno if there’s any Vanilla tho’)
rem
rem.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:25 pmrem… i dunno, maybe quimsome red cherry?
August 12th, 2008 at 8:39 pmYou grew up in 70s British cuisine, and you are still alive? Must have been the move to Japan that saved you.
I remember having the worst “hamburger” (believe me, the scare quotes are necessary) in the world at a Little Chef roadside restaurant late one night in the 70s. I felt sick after a couple bites (it would have been one bite, but I eat too fast), and then my car broke down.
I can’t explain why, but I am sure the food was responsible for that, too.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:43 pmWell, to be fair, my mother cooked most of what I ate, so survival’s perhaps not such a surprise. Little Chef sausages or hamburgers, though… They used to carry warnings, you know. “May contain meat”. And despite being found every few miles along every motorway, they still went out of business a while back.
August 13th, 2008 at 8:44 am“May contain meat”
They really had no idea at all what was in their food, then? They just bought it off the back of a truck from some Chinese guy?
August 13th, 2008 at 10:10 am