When: June 20
A vanilla milkshake has three ingredients: good vanilla ice cream, whole milk, and sometimes a splash of vanilla extract. The quality of the ice cream is the only variable that matters. Everything else is technique.
The vanilla milkshake is the purest test of ice cream quality — nothing to hide behind.
The word "milkshake" originally described a drink that had nothing to do with ice cream. In the late 19th century, a milkshake was a shaken mixture of milk, eggs, and whiskey — essentially an eggnog variant consumed for its supposed restorative properties. The soda fountain milkshake — ice cream blended with milk — only became possible in the 1920s, when the electric blender became available to commercial operators. A different machine, a different drink, the same name. Vanilla became the default milkshake flavor for the same reason it became the default ice cream flavor: it plays well with everything else. Vanilla's flavor compound, vanillin, enhances the perception of sweetness without adding sugar. It functions as an amplifier — making chocolate taste more chocolatey, fruit taste brighter, cream taste richer. A plain vanilla milkshake demonstrates the ingredient at full strength, with nothing to hide behind. The quality variable is almost entirely the ice cream. A milkshake made...