We know ice cream by flavors like vanilla, chocolate, ube, mango and rocky road. But how about atis, green tea and durian? Believe it or not, unusual ice cream flavors are available in the market. We didn’t find “vomit” or “toadstool flavors” (remember Harry Potter?), but we found several flavors far from the usual.
Arce Dairy Ice Cream and Fruits in Ice Cream offer unusual flavors in ice cream priced a little steeper than big brands Selecta and Nestle. Arce Dairy started out as an ice cream parlor in 1946, carrying the brand name “Selecta.”
However, after the Concepcion Business group acquired the Selecta trademark from the Arces in 1990, the family stuck to the parlor name: Arce Dairy Ice Cream. Along with the new name, the Arces developed new flavors using carabao milk in their ice cream, a tradition they’ve practiced since the start.
Meanwhile, Fruits in Ice Cream came out in 1997 after four executives from Magnolia Ice Cream decided to strike it on their own. Since then they have focused on marketing their brand abroad and have produced several unusual flavors.
Now, make your summer different by trying these extraordinary ice cream flavors.
Mantequilla, anyone?
That’s right: mantequila, or butter, can now be enjoyed frozen. Arce Dairy’s mantecado ice cream can serve as a good filling for bread on a hot sunny afternoon. As an experiment, why not try a scoop of mantecado ice cream on your pancake and glaze it with maple syrup?
Another flavor is durian, the fruit which “smells like hell but tastes like heaven.” The ice cream tastes like the durian candy, creamy-sweet with neither a disgusting nor delicious aftertaste.
Citrus fruits are also part of Arce’s ice cream flavors, with the mandarin-orange flavor with bits of orange and ponkan (or mandarin) rind in the ice cream. Arce’s blend of milk and fruit never fails—one can sense the sweetness of mandarin oranges and the sweet-sour flavor of orange melt with the irresistible cream. Mandarin-orange ice cream is surely a less common way to sample two common fruits.
Absolutely unthinkable
Then there are also ice cream flavors that would seem quite bizarre and “unthinkable.”
Unlike the mandarin-orange ice cream, the lemon-calamansi variant lacks the creamy taste of milk. The ice cream tastes more like calamansi juice—only frozen. It is a tangy way to enjoy summer.
The green tea flavor from Fruits in Ice Cream, on the other hand, has an unusual taste which resembles milk-tea, probably from the mixture of creamy-sweet milk and the naturally bitter tea. However, the green tea flavor can be undesirable for others, because of the weird taste which lingers in your mouth after eating it.
As if those ice cream flavors are not enough, try Atis Delight, but this Arce Dairy concoction lacks the atis taste, which should be sweet, with a tinge of sourness and a tang of bitterness blended in the white, fibrous flesh of the fruit. An exception is the texture of the ice cream: it has small bits of the atis fruit, felt through the grainy particles one is likely to experience while eating the fruit. But again, for the uncanny idea, it’s forgivable.
Other bizarre flavors are Blueberry Cheesecake, Avocado, Macapuno-Nangka, and Pistachio Dare to taste them yourself for a change.
