The inside scoop: July is ice cream month

Jul. 23—The question remains, does Ice Cream make everything better? If looking in the United States it seems so as, ninety-eight percent of all US households purchase ice cream, with more sold on Sunday than any other day of the week, according to prnewswire.com 2017.

July is Ice Cream Month in the United States, with Ice Cream Day being this past Sunday, July 18th. President Ronald Reagan declared July "National Ice Cream Month" in 1984.

Following the American Revolution, ice cream became super popular in the US. Since then ice cream has exploded onto the desert scene with the creation of home machines, as well as the emergence of ice cream vans, ice cream floats, sundaes, and well-known brands like "Ben and Jerry's" and "Haagen-Dazs" that we still consume to this day. The effect of ice cream on society is so great, that the brain of an ice cream lover has been likened to that of an addict. When the brain wants ice cream, it reacts like a passionate fanatic. Thomas Jefferson was an ice cream fanatic and the Library of Congress collected his original handwritten recipe for vanilla ice cream.

Many surveys have been taken about favorite flavors across the nation and results on them seem to vary from state to state with vanilla and chocolate still remaining as top flavors but you will find that Cookies N' Cream, Mint Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Coffee, Buttered Pecan, and Moose Tracks were on the top chosen in many.

Ice Cream is not all the same across the world, in some countries it can be quite different. Researching all about July being ice cream month, there were some unusual and quite different ice creams in other countries.

For example, one of the coolest new street snacks in Thailand is i tim pad, a made-to-order ice cream that's not churned, but quick-frozen on a frozen metal disc. In just a couple minutes, the liquid base freezes into a thin pancake of solid ice cream, bolstered with whatever mix-ins you ask for (crushed Oreos are common). The theatrics really begin when the stall owner scrapes the ice cream off the metal plate with a paint-scraper, creating perfect hollow cylinders of ice cream that are then stacked vertically in a cup.

Our idea of a delicious treat just got fishy. In Japan, you can enjoy a nice scoop of squid ice cream. Kasumi, or squid ink, started out as a bit of a novelty ice cream flavor in Japan but is becoming more and more common. The squid ink has a slightly fishy taste and gives the ice cream and shocking black color—this is one for the adventurous eater! Miso is a traditional Japanese ingredient made from fermented soybeans. It's very salty and when used in ice cream has a sweet and salty flavor similar to salted butterscotch.

If you want to see creamy ice cream pushed to its limits, head to Turkey for Dondurma, where the frozen treat of choice is ice cream as stretchy as melted mozzarella and as chewy as taffy.

In India, the ice cream of choice is kulfi, a dense dessert frozen in molds rather than churned in an ice cream maker. It's made with milk cooked for hours on the stove with sugar, nuts, and/or spices until it turns thick, syrupy, then hardened into popsicle shapes and eaten on sticks.

Depending on which side of the Atlantic you call home, spumoni can mean very different things. In Italy, it's traditionally a semifreddo-like molded dessert, while in the US, it's more ice cream-like and scoopable. Spumoni has two main distinguishing characteristics: the inclusion of nuts and/or candied fruit, and the tendency to layer different flavors, Neapolitan-style, into a single batch.

Dippin' Dots have long been called the 'ice cream of the future" but it dates back 28 years when an Illinois grad student got the idea to flash-freeze little droplets of liquid ice cream base in liquid nitrogen to make tiny pearls of ultra-creamy ice cream. The dots became a hit at mass venues like malls and sports stadiums but have never made it into the consumer market in retail shops or grocery stores. That's because Dippin' Dots require exceptionally cold temperatures to remain hard, separate, and dot-like—below -40°F, which is lower than most grocery and all home freezers could ever hope to maintain.

Whatever your taste buds might crave, ice cream in any form seems to be the dessert so many in the world love to enjoy, during July the Ice Cream Month, go and enjoy some from your favorite ice cream place.

Reach Kimberly Jenkins (740)353-3101 ext. 1928

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