When: July 1
Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day invites the making or ordering of ice cream in a flavor you've never tried before — not vanilla, not chocolate, not strawberry. The ice cream flavor landscape is enormous and genuinely surprising, and the craft ice cream movement of the last 20 years has produced flavors that have nothing in common with the freezer aisle.
Ice cream has 5,000 named flavors and most people order vanilla — so today is a direct challenge to that habit.
For most of American history, ice cream meant vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. These weren't limitations — they were the flavors that worked, the flavors that the chemistry of cream and cold amplified into something extraordinary. But the range of what ice cream can hold is much wider than any of them suggested, and it took a generation of chef-driven ice cream makers to find out how wide. Ice cream's flavor chemistry makes it an exceptional vehicle for unusual ingredients. The fat in cream coats the tongue and slows down flavor perception, stretching short-lived aromatic compounds into longer experiences. Cold suppresses sweetness but amplifies savory and bitter notes. Spice compounds that would be overwhelming in a sauce become interesting accents in a cold, fatty medium. These properties mean that ingredients which don't obviously belong in dessert — miso, olive oil, blue cheese, corn, black pepper — can work better in ice cream than in more conventional preparations. Ben &...