Strange summer taste sensations: Would you eat Raw Horseflesh or Pit Viper ice cream?

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ghastly ice cream flavours! You can always count on Japan and other Asian cuisines for a taste of the weird and wonderful. But these days, they’re not the only ones. North Americans and Europeans alike are slurping their fair share. Here are two scoops’ worth of weird and wonderful flavours to beat the heat…and the mundane…this summer:

1. Garlic Ice Cream. Your Twilight-crazed teenage girls may be interested in this vampire-friendly ice cream that you can really sink your teeth into. Rather than warding off vampires, though, you may ward off a few ice cream lovers instead. Some say it’s bloody awful; others—like residents in the town of Gilroy, California—say they make the best garlic ice cream for their Annual Garlic Festival.
2. Red Wine Ice Cream. For those moms who feel that drinking wine is medically necessary, now it can be done subversively while your kids are enjoying their own peculiar flavour.
3. Cold Sweat Ice Cream. Don’t worry. This ice cream is not made with the remnants of your gym workout. Rather, there are three kinds of peppers and two kinds of hot sauce. It’s so spicy that just touching it makes your fingers feel hot. It’s not a top seller in the North Carolina ice cream parlour off I-55. One of the ice cream shop’s regular customers likened its taste to “fire – with a side of fire.” That sure brings a new meaning to the words ‘Hot Fudge.’
4. Haggis and Hot Fudge. Morelli’s ice cream parlour began selling ice creams with flavors inspired by traditional British foods in September 2008. This means you’ll be able to have a scoop of Yorkshire pudding-flavored, or haggis ice cream. How about a pork pie parfait or a Lancashire hotpot? Even the traditional English breakfast – sausage and mash – is available.
5. Curry and coconut custard. Vosges Haut Chocolat, an American company known for their exotic blends…and their bacon chocolate bars…has some unique ice cream flavours, like curry and coconut custard, dark chocolate and pandan (a dark green leaf popular in Asian cooking) and wattleseed & roasted macadamia nut custard. But taking a taste on the wild side is going to cost you…US$45.00 a pint to be precise.
6. Spaghetti ice cream. No, not really, but tomato ice cream is a common flavour in Asia, where it is considered a fruit, and treated no different than a strawberry or a mango. You say tomayto, I say blech.
7. Mushroom-pumpkin ice cream. Inspired by the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival in Pennsylvania, mushrooms were also coupled with pecans to mixed reviews. And don’t worry, no ‘special’ mushrooms were used in the making of this ice cream.
8. Wasabi ginger. Cold Stone Creamery sells a surprising combination of this horseradish paste more commonly used to add a kick to sushi. Coupling it with ginger makes it tangy and…dare it be said?…delicious.
9. Chunky Bacon and Barbecue. Not together. No. no. That would be weird. But you can’t have a Top 10 list of weird ice cream flavours and not include bacon. Udder Delight owner Chip Hearn in Delaware, USA worked hard to get the ice cream just right. All jokes aside, it’s not easy to fuse ingredients together. They could separate or freeze and often having a feature flavour takes a lot of trial and error, and many wasted ingredients.
10. Goat cheese and Caramelized Onion Ice Cream. Served with a strawberry-rhubarb compote, this is actually a really tasty combo. Similarly, Churchfield Farm in the UK has unveiled a Stilton Cheese Ice Cream. They say it goes great with holiday mincemeat pies, but we’ll just have to take their word for it.

Honourable mention –

Viagra Ice Cream. Before you go scrambling to find out where you can buy this new marvel, know that it’s made from orange and pineapple in a blue ice cream, with Pop Rocks added at the end. Yet another flavour hailing from Udder Delight, Hearn says “When it goes into your mouth, you get all the Pop Rocks popping,” who makes no medical claims for the concoction.

If these don’t frighten your taste buds, there are hundreds of other combinations including Sauerkraut Sherbert, Squash Ice Cream and Mustard Ice Cream, to name a few. Some of these flavours may be hard to swallow, but at the very least, they’ll be sure to keep your summer sizzling.

Have you had a really weird flavor of ice cream, or some other bizarre summer treat? Drop us a line and let us know!