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April 26, 2007
ikasumi soft-serve is the new black
Sea salt and citrus soft-serve ice cream.
You can find soft-serve ice cream everywhere in Japan. It is based on this simple equation: where you find tourists, you find vendors selling soft-serve. Where you find anything at all worth seeing, you find tourists. Every place in Japan boasts something worth seeing. Therefore, soft-serve is everywhere. This is a good thing.
Vanilla, strawberry and matcha are the standards, but the best part about soft-serve in Japan is its use as a vehicle for all manner of seasonal, regional and barely-edible ingredients, meaning that any decent tourist attraction will have its own special flavor. I like to try them all. I look it less as gluttony and more as a hobby, like collecting stamps. Except with nothing to show for it but some torn cone wrappers and a small ice cream belly.
Squid ink soft-serve ice cream.
Many soft-serve flavors I've tried have been both strange and delicious, like houji-cha (roasted green tea), shionami (sea salt), umeboshi, and tomato. Others have been less weird but just as good, like kuri (chestnut), iyokan (a kind of citrus fruit) and sakura (cherry blossom). Only one flavor was bad enough to force me to abandon the cone: ikasumi (squid ink), purchased at a stall near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. I remember it tasted almost like chocolate, but there was something wrong beneath the almost-chocolate, a shadowy squid taste lurking below the surface which drove me to abandon ship.
What makes all these flavors so easy to eat is the fact that it is soft-serve (sofuto kuriimu in Japanese) rather than regular ice cream. If I had to maneuver around chunks of frozen tomato, I don't think I'd be as happy as I am eating a cone of something smooth and yielding that tastes faintly of tomatoes. (If you are wondering, this particular soft-serve reminds me of a fresh mozzarella and tomato salad, but sweet, of course.) The cutting-edge of food is all about changing the textures of familiar foods into something more unexpected, but foams and flavored papers are nothing next to Japan's national program of soft-serving everything under the Rising Sun. I'll toast my cone of kinako to that.
Posted on April 26, 2007 12:57 AM | Categories: Musings | Sweets | Weird | Western Food
Comments
I loooveeeeee soft serve! Since it was January when I was in Japan, the only "different" flavor I encountered was Black Sesame in Nara, which really isn't anything "different" considering all the other flavors that could have been available. The strawberry and matcha are to die for tho. Yum! I hope to try more when I return. The citure and sea salt cone is so beautiful!
As for hard ice cream, I've had corn and cheese flavor. You're so right about the texture. It was sttrange having corn kernels and cheese chunks in there....
Posted by: Sera on April 26, 2007 1:58 AM
The town I used to live in had red-wine sofuto. One of the neighboring towns had hourensou (spinach) flavored soft serve.
My favorites are houji-cha and sakura, but I'm always up for Mini Stop's Flavor of the Month.
Posted by: Sarah on April 26, 2007 7:54 AM
Mmmm, soft serve isn't quite up to my purist/foodsnob tendencies, but I love it anyway. There was a DQ within walking distance where I lived until five years old, and I was marked for life. I want to try chestnut soft serve! Anjali, I found a recipe for kinako ice cream in The Perfect Scoop, and thought of you. Do you have an ice cream maker?
Posted by: Amy on April 26, 2007 10:45 AM
I do have an ice cream maker and I actually made a really good kinako ice cream last summer. I plan on making it again once the weather warms up!
Posted by: Anjali on April 26, 2007 12:44 PM
In Shimonoseki there's a store that sells uni soft cream. It's odd... but not half bad, once you have to get used to the subtle salty echinoderm undertone. That tomato flavor sounds yummy, though!
Posted by: Tim on April 29, 2007 5:56 PM
What a shame that the squid ink soft serve was inedible. It is so beautiful and glossy looking. Oh well, sometimes beauty is only skin deep. I love reading your blogs, and I am pretty sure that you are the bravest American ever. Best of luck to you in your adventures!
Posted by: Andrea on May 2, 2007 1:01 PM
Damn that looks tasty. I really love squid ink, however I can get it. It's really too bad the ink soft serve wasn't better.
With these flavors, it sounds like you'd have no problem making a 5 course dinner out of nothing but soft serve.
Posted by: Laurent on May 17, 2007 2:49 AM
What does "matcha" taste like??
Posted by: Moe on May 18, 2007 6:11 AM
I tried "kusamochi" flavor in Fukushima.
I really liked it, tasted like the real thing.
Posted by: ashley on May 25, 2007 1:07 AM
Oh! I had eel ice cream (though not soft-serve) when I went to Hammamatsu. I thought you could hardly taste the eel, it just had little black bits in it. Quite enjoyable really. I think after living in Japan for a while you get used to many things having a slight fishy taste, and then you no longer taste it? Now that I'm back in the US Japanese food usually tastes a bit more fishy than it did while I lived there. Or is it just my imagination?
Posted by: justarabbit on June 5, 2007 2:40 AM