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Ummm, no. Don't. Think. So. I don't think any flavoured ice creams sell terribly well, apart from the normal. Not in any shop I've ever worked in, anyway - but maybe my whole 'stern disapproval' thing was putting off all the potential buyers.
The concept of chilli ice cream sounds like it’d be ‘interesting,’ but not particularly nice. Like cider-flavoured ice cream: *sings* nice dreeeaaaamm.
Pfft. Sweet Potato ice cream sounds positively tame compared to some of the strange shit the Japanese have come up with for ice cream flavors.
Something Fishy Is Going On In Japan in the Ice-Cream Biz: Eels, Clams, Salmon Eggs, Saury - All Are Flavors Savored by Local Economies
By Phred Dvorak
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 4, 2002
ISHINOMAKI, Japan -- Yoshiaki Sato was in the hospital with an ulcer 13 years ago, when he saw an unforgettable image on the TV news. Piles of fish -- Pacific saury -- were sliding off delivery trucks and spilling onto the street.
Mr. Sato, who runs a confectionery shop in this little fishing city in northern Japan, recalls being outraged at the waste of so much saury, a skinny, beak-nosed fish that is a regional specialty. Mr. Sato resolved to do his bit to stimulate fish consumption -- by making saury ice cream.
"It was so smelly that all my staff hated me," says Mr. Sato, a wiry 54-year-old with a toothy grin. "They told me nobody would eat that stuff."
As it turned out, there was a market for Mr. Sato's fish ice cream -- along with ice cream he now makes from sea slugs, whale meat, soft-shelled turtles and cedar chips. Mr. Sato's sweet shop, Fugetsudo, is now at the forefront of a small but growing cottage industry making ice-cream flavors of exotic regional specialties.
The town of Toyoma in northeastern Japan touts pickled-orchid ice cream. A company in central Nagoya City offers a boxed set of chicken-wing and shrimp flavors. Goro Matsushita, an ice-cream distributor in central Shizuoka prefecture, pushes a popular eel ice cream, using only select native eels bred in clear water. Next year, he's adding a short-necked-clam flavor made with shellfish from a local lake.
Weird ice cream is hardly unique to Japan. U.S. food writer Bruce Weinstein's "Ultimate Ice Cream Book," published by HarperCollins, gives recipes for bubble-gum, lavender-petal and praline-chile-flavored ice creams. Aldrich's Dairy in Fredonia, N.Y., has sold sauerkraut and minestrone ice creams during its April Fools' Day specials.
But in Japan, economic downturn and pork-barrel politics have broadened the market for fringe ice-cream flavors beyond epicures and thrill-seekers. In recent years, some of Japan's strangest concoctions have come from rural communities striving to attract tourists and public aid by serving up their local specialties on a cone.
The reason: Ice cream is cheap and easy to make in small lots -- just right for village promotions. And it keeps well in a freezer. Japan's regional governments have been generously pumping out money for projects to revitalize their areas, which means local groups can even buy an ice-cream machine on the public dime.
Mr. Sato is profiting from this trend by offering himself as a one-stop shop for communities with ice-cream dreams. "Once some chamber of commerce brings you their local produce, all you have to do is arrange [the ice cream] so it tastes good," he says.
Mr. Sato, a fourth-generation confectioner, shifted from his family's traditional Japanese sweets 19 years ago to try his hand at Western-style cakes and ice cream. In an early attempt to adapt Western desserts to the Japanese palate, he unexpectedly scored with an ice cream made with a local variety of rice. The confection won Mr. Sato an agricultural-ministry award for high-quality foods.
Soon, Mr. Sato experimented with abalone, another local delicacy. Then came his hospitalization, and Pacific saury. Mr. Sato says he was so excited by the idea of making saury ice cream that he sneaked out of the hospital in the night and rushed to his modest ice-cream factory to try out ideas. "The next morning, the factory staff came and made a huge fuss," he recalls. "They said, 'What's this stink?' " He now says his collection of nearly 80 "oddball" flavors rack up sales of as much as $850,000 a year.
Making fish ice cream posed particular challenges. First, the high water content in the flesh made it rock-hard when frozen. Mr. Sato solved that problem by soaking his fish -- and mollusks, too -- in alcohol, which has a lower freezing temperature than water.
Then, there was that rank, fishy smell that permeated the ice cream. After putting his employees through months of grueling taste-tests, Mr. Sato accumulated a mass of tips: Boil octopus in brown tea for eight hours, and steam shark fin with green onions and miso to expunge the ammonia smell.
Saury, Mr. Sato says, was the stinkiest of all. It wasn't enough to steep the fish in milk or Japanese liquor. So Mr. Sato came up with a seven-step method that uses whiskey, brandy and five other kinds of alcohol to kill the smell, then adds walnuts, almonds, peanuts and chocolate to "Westernize" the flavor. The ice cream, priced at $2.10 for a four-ounce cup, is so good that even kids don't find it fishy, Mr. Sato insists.
But consumers are quick to detect little specks of fish meat that linger on the tongue long after the cream has melted. "The chocolate base was tasty enough, but it was all defeated by the smell of the minced fish," says Tsuyoshi Oshima, a 30-year-old engineer who got the saury ice cream from a Tokyo food fair in July. "I couldn't finish it."
Whatever the taste, the prospect of commercializing local produce was enough to entice little burgs like Funagata, a declining town of 7,000 in northern Japan. Its charcoal industry had long ago been shoved aside by coal and gas, and officials were seeking new sources of income. Four years ago, a delegation of Funagata elders discovered Mr. Sato in another town, helping develop salmon ice cream. The officials were intrigued. Funagata had been promoting a fresh-water fish called ayu through ayu rice crackers, pickled ayu guts and a Miss Ayu beauty contest. But it didn't have ayu ice cream.
"I thought it would be tough," says Kotaro Shinobu, the Funagata Chamber of Commerce official charged with developing the ice cream with Mr. Sato. "But we had to do something."
The chamber quickly secured government aid -- about $51,000 over five years -- to buy the ice-cream maker and market the product. Mr. Sato helped devise a pressure-cooking process that solved the biggest obstacle: fine fish bones that stuck up out of the ice-cream. Funagata got a patent for fresh-water fish ice cream, although Mr. Shinobu concedes that ayu ice cream isn't breaking any sales records.
Missu House, an ice-cream maker on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, has given up on fish ice cream, with the exception of crab and sea urchin, which have relatively tame odors. It had an especially unpleasant experience with salmon roe, one of Hokkaido's best-known delicacies, because the orange fish-egg globules kept bursting in the ice-cream machine.
Mr. Sato, however, sees no limits. When a wealthy boat owner asked him to make ice cream out of a poisonous pit viper -- which Japanese believe increases virility -- Mr. Sato said yes, for $8.50 a cup, and added it to his menu. Mr. Sato says he skinned the snake, steamed it in sake, then plunked it into an industrial juicer "head first, whrrrr-rrrr-rrrr." The resulting concoction is the color of toffee and has a raw, earthy scent of fertilizer.
Now, Mr. Sato says he's entertaining a request from the neighboring town of Motoyoshi to make their local specialty -- fireflies -- into ice cream. "You mean that bug?" asks Mr. Sato's startled wife, Mitsuko. "Oh, don't do fireflies."
Mr. Sato ignores her. "I've already thought it out," he says. "It'll be fine."
If you want to see the actual containers for some of the aforementioned japanese ice creams, see this link: funky flavors.
I personally cannot fathom how anyone could like seafood ice cream. In this case, savoury just doesn't mix with sweet. I use to buy my neices Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Jelly Beans. The jelly bean flavors included one listed as "sardine". Brave soul that I am, I tasted it, and sure enough, it did taste like sardines - except it was sweet. Imagine biting into a sugary sardine with the texture of gelatin. Ugh. Beyond gross. Anyway, I digress. If the sardine jelly bean is anything to go by, the fish ice cream must be foul.
*shivers in disgust* Brr.
*goes off to get real ice cream* |
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