Give me real ice cream

It is getting humid and hot everyday in Tokyo, maybe in next week rainy season will come soon. Today I ate one of this new released Japanese type ice cream Wagokoro. I picked "Kuromitsu" black sugar syrup one. It was delicious. On their TV ad, you can listen Kyoto dialect. Of course Wagokoro has green tea and Azuki version too, like I wrote before we really love those two flavors.

I heard this year's ice cream trend is "healthy" like low calories type and soy milk type. Although every year we have new release ice cream products, and we have a lot of kinds of green tea and red beans ice cream. Comparing to the North America, we have poor ice cream selection. Most of all, we don't have ice cream shop like Baskin & Robbins or Cold Stone creamery. Why? hmm we love ice cream but I don't eat so much. The Japan Ice Cream Association said the American people eat ice cream 6 times as much as Japanese do, and sales volume is 1.5 times. Thinking of the difference of population is about three times, American people eat double the amount of ice cream with half price.

I don't know why. Despite of such poor selection, there are many weird flavor ice cream in this country. Since we have a weird food fads this year, things seem to be getting worse. The Daily Mainichi wrote about it. Here are some samples.

Sea foods ice creams
Abalone, Octopus Ice Cream , Fish Ice Cream, Crab Ice Cream

vegetable ice creams
Garlic Mint Ice Cream, Spinach Ice Cream, Wasabi Ice Cream, Sweet Potato Ice Cream

dish ice creams
Indian Curry Ice Cream, Indian Curry Ice Cream , Miso Ramen Ice Cream , Cheese Risotto Ice Cream

Meat Ice cream
Raw Horseflesh Ice Cream, Chicken Wing Ice Cream , Pit Viper Ice Cream , Ox Tongue Ice Cream

Umm crazy...orz. Which one is the worse one for you? Salad Ice Cream lacks punch, but it seems very tasteless for me. I think I can eat alcohol type like Stout Ice Cream, Potato Liquor Ice Cream, Red Wine Ice Cream. And I want to try this, Cherry Blossom Ice Cream. By the way, I don't need such ice creams, I want real nice ice cream.

related link
The best selling ice cream is...

Comments

[Elisabeth]

Funny thing, in the beginning of ice cream, the Europeans came up with even stranger ice cream ideas. Some ice cream concoctions included pureed asparagus, duck liver, bread crumbs and even cheese! While fish-flavored ice cream is a little much, I think that you guys are all right in experimenting a little.

[I'm doing a research project on ice cream, so my head is filled with all kinds of useless knowledge right now. :D]

There are Baskin Robbins here in Kyoto too; most Japanese call them "31."
The thing I noticed here is this strange paradox:
- Japanese love chocolate
- Japanese love ice cream
- yet try to find chocolate ice cream...

[Liz]

There are Baskin Robbins in Japan, well there's a store in Riverwalk in Kokura, Kyushu...and i've seen CMs on tv for Baskin Robbins in Japan...maybe it's getting more popular. I've seen Hagen Daas...that seems to be really popular in Japan too. I've noticed that in Japan, they serve what I would call "soft serve"...which is more like whipped flavoured-cream rather than the heavier icecreams from other places...

ahhaa..I have yet to see a meat or seafood flavoured icecream in Japan...;]

[Marco Bresciani]

Italian one is the best ice-cream! :-)

[nichol]

Seriously, do a Wiki or at least Google search before asking a question like that!

Wikipedia:
orz

Where I am in Japan we do have Baskin Robbins, at least in Jusco :V

It is true that there isn't very much real ice cream here, and when there is it's really expensive, but there's lots of great frozen treats. I really like azuki monaka and momo-flavour Coolish :)

Last year I was in the supermarket and I saw rock-salt flavoured monaka. I couldn't resist. I wish I had though. It was absolutely disgusting. you would bite into your ice cream and get a mouth full of salt. Yuck. I only saw it that one time though so I guess it wasn't very popular :D

Oh and I had kinako-flavoured Turkish Ice. MMMMM japaturkalicious!

[suzanne]

When I lived in Japan I tried to get some ice cream from a 7-11 in January and they wouldn't sell it to me. They said it was too cold outside for icecream! I was so upset because I hadn't eaten my yearly quota of ice cream. Man those are so weird flavas- Chicken Wing? Ugh!

[rc]

I know this is completely off-topic, but I noticed you write '...orz' a lot. May I ask what that means?

[bshock]

As much as Americans like to eat meat, I don't think most of them would enjoy it in ice cream. That is just a matter of custom and habit, though.

I suspect that the reason Americans eat more ice cream than Japanese is because of lactose intolerance. Many Americans are descended from Northern Europeans, who have an unusually low rate of lactose intolerance as adults.