I’d rather have a massively over poured cone that has been rolled in three different breakfast cereals and edible glitter that looks good for a selfie for 30 seconds before it starts melting onto my $200 manicure.
/s
Sarcasm: Sounds great, should go for the price of two kidneys and one foot!
Vanilla? Boring! I hate it when people like things I don’t like!
I’m gonna make the worker give me a sample of about 1700 of those. I’m allergic to the other 300.
Ham, probably.
I want fresh baked croissant with Lindt chocolate filling
Vanilla is a deep and complex flavor and the quality of an ice cream shops vanilla flavor is a great indicator for the overall quality of the shop.
It’s like a cheese burger. I’m not interested in your super special quirky whatever burger if you can’t make a great cheese burger.
The reason that vanilla became… well, the poster child of blandness, is that it was one of the first and simplest flavours to be artificially created. So everyone threw the cheap flavouring into everything.
Synthetic vanilla is missing all the complexity, it’s just 1 chemical.
Real vanilla remains wonderful, and it’s sad how it’s been ill treated by industrial food companies.
Especially considering how much better the real stuff is to use now. You used to only have vanilla extract (which is alcohol after vanilla was steeped in it to draw out the soluble flavors) which pales in comparison to the fresh stuff (use it in baked goods where most of the volatiles would evaporate anyway), and whole vanilla pods, which required laborious splitting and scraping with a sharp knife to get the seeds and pulp. Nowadays you can buy jarred vanilla paste, which is 98% as good as a freshly scraped pod while requiring 0% of the effort.
You can tell a lot about a restaurant by the quality of their Reuben
A local chain near me used to have the best vanilla I’ve ever had (edit: the depth of flavor was off the charts. Part of the flavor was like a dark tea-like flavor or quality, with a bunch of other notes, it was unreal). I only had a scoop of it, maybe three or four times, then I think right before the pandemic they got rid of it because sourcing the vanilla was too expensive or some kind of environmental concern or something, I’m not sure.
I still patiently await its return…
Yeah. One podcaster said that a good indicator of the kitchen at the restaurant, which says how good the restaurant, is simply requesting Eggs Benedict. I see the argument.
I just… I find life too short to shackle myself with that game, unless I intend to repeat a visit, which the cartoon would indicate not.
That might be true for high class restaurants, but I would imagine most restaurants wouldn’t have a clue what eggs Benedict is. That doesn’t make it a bad restaurant.
I agree in general. But this isn’t a new store that opened on the corner of your street. You aren’t staying here. There’s no need to judge how good it is overall. It’s entire point of existing is to try unique things. Like if I’m on holiday in another country I’m not going to vet them on the safe choice. I may never come back.
I love that everybody in here actually knows what’s up. I’m among my people.
All ice cream shops should have banana ice cream.
And Blackraspberry!
I freaking love the s’mores blizzard at DQ. My roommate is obsessed with s’mores ice cream. I talk up the blizzard and he says “man, I’ve got to try that”. Sounds good. Let’s make a plan.
For a month I try to get him to DQ with me, until finally we’re there. But it’s seasonal, so we can’t get it anymore. Keep checking in for months until I see it available again. Another month of trying to convince him to go there. We literally spend the car ride there talking about how good s’mores ice cream is.
We get to the counter: “Can I get a chocolate sunday?”
This is the fifth time he’s done this in similar situations. I simply do not eat out with him any more.
Have you tried Ben & Jerry’s “Gimme S’More” flavor? It’s my favorite of their newer flavors. Marshmallow ice cream with chocolate covered bits of graham cracker. It’s so good.
ugh, that suckssss
A lot of massive flavor shops are slop slinging all kinds of candy and sugary bits in ice cream that’s mediocre. A place that’s good should be able to do that vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry so well they’re a delight to eat.
I’m gonna add pistachio to that list as well.
You’re pistaching me off
Those flavours are the standard for a reason!
Oh god, I was visiting in Seligenstadt and they have a really good ice-cream shop there and the stracciatella and strawberry were DIVINE!
I always judge ice cream shops on their ability to do the basics. If they can’t pull off a good vanilla, then I’m not scrounging around to see if they do anything else well.
Everyone disses vanilla, because it became commercialised.
But a good vanilla ice cream? Better than most other flavours. Excluding sorbets, because a good lemon and raspberry sorbet is best.
I have an ice cream machine and make my own. And frankly there is not much that beats a good homemade vanilla icecream made with quality dairy and vanilla. It is completely different from all of the mass produced ones.
But yeah, homemade sorbets are fantastic too, and so incredibly easy to make.
Vanilla is one of the classics for a reason. That’s a fuckin earned spot.
A place near me always fucks with my requested spice because I’m a tiny white girl and they assume indian curry spice is too much for me (my ex grew reapers and I can cook with them even though they only bring heat and metallic flavor. I prefer the flavor of ghost peppers, but either way, a spicy vindaloo is workable)
But they always give me several mango gelato servings on top when they tone down the spice in my order, so I order the hottest thing I can, and they give me the toned-down version which is about what I want, and I get free mango gelato. Sexism win.
(and yes, I have compared what I get to what a friend gets from the same place, and it’s entirely different.)
Good lemon sorbet is number one
So good
Excluding sorbets, because a good lemon and raspberry sorbet is best.
My top 2 ice creams are :
- Lychee sortbet, Lyon
- Mango gelato/sortbet , Rome
You cannot just leave passion fruit (maracuja) sorbet out of that list. It’s like old money mango.
Well, I didn’t try that one, so it can’t be in my top list
Vanilla is actually one of the most complex and layered flavors you can experience. It’s a shame it somehow came to be associated with being plain, bland, and boring.
That’s due to commercial vanilla flavurs being only vanillin. Real vanilla has so much more things in it that gives it’s flavour
For the longest time I thought vanilla was the base for ice cream and other stuff was added to it to make flavors. I apologize to vanilla for not treating and appreciating it as its own flavor for so long.
For the longest time I thought vanilla was the base for ice cream and other stuff was added to it to make flavors
this is how they do shakes at fast food places
they only carry vanilla ice cream. chocolate or strawberry syrup gets added to make it a different flavor
Vanilla carries ice cream. I’ve had plain (as in no flavorants at all) ice cream before, and that shit is vile. Cold dulls taste, so even though it’s made with cream an unflavored ice cream tastes like frozen skim milk.
ChocolateMaxxing has no bandwidth for vanilla.
Made my choice decades ago.
Most likely still has vanilla and probably wouldn’t taste as good without. It’s like salt for desserts (well, in addition to salt being salt for desserts).
This is how I evaluate a new fast food place. I order regular fries.
If you can’t get that right, I’m never coming back.
The virtue of simplicity is that its flaws are not so easily concealed; it is hard to do simple things perfectly, and it is always visible when they’ve been done badly.
I believe a lot of Japanese cuisine uses this premise.
First time I went to Chili’s, I got chicken strips. They were the driest chicken strips I’ve ever had, followed closely by Cheddar’s. I haven’t been back to either.
I’m not sure how accurate a metric that would be. Burger King has changed their fries a dozen or more times over the years, but I’m pretty sure one of their worst fry recipes was back in the nineties when the rest of their food was still pretty decent.
Yeah, fries are made very differently from most other foods. Some places might focus on them while other places might add them as an afterthought because people want more than the burgers they put most of their effort into.
Also, the better a place’s sushi is, the lower the chance they even serve fries.
I tend to order a Ruben at any new place for the same reason.
It’s a simple sandwich, but so easy to fuck up.
What’s weird is one of the places that gets it right is Arby’s. I wasn’t expecting a decent Reuben from a fast food joint.
i swear i read this exact comment under this exact comic strip months or years ago and i dont know if its just deja vu or a weird coincidence
Judging by this comment thread, it seems others do the same, but I feel strangely that I made a comment like that one in the past so you have maybe seen me twice.
Yea its my goto for new shops aswell, although when im feeling freaky ill even do the choco+vanilla combo!
Similarly, when I try a new pizza place I order the cheese
Same. Can’t build a house on sand.
I’d rather have their take on pistachio or chocolate than end up with a shitty vanilla.
If their vanilla is shitty then their chocolate and pistachio will be too.
Yeah, but IMO, chocolate is hard to screw up. Even very shitty chocolate ice cream is still pretty good.
If you find yourself in a situation where you only have shitty ice cream available, always go for the chocolate.
I have only had one chocolate ice cream that didn’t have s nasty, chalky texture. I made it myself.
That or the taste of butyric acid (the infamous ‘vomit’ aftertaste people associate with Hershey’s), which you can’t escape in the US because most of our cheap chocolate uses that process.
Holy shit have you tasted Hershey’s made in the last ~5 years? It is unreal how bad it is now. Completely inedible. Like they raced to the bottom and plunged through like an admin in Minecraft blowing through bedrock. I tried making smores with it last year, for nostalgia’s sake… Nobody at that campfire could eat them, it was horrendous. We all talked about it, trying to figure out if that’s just how it always was and we’ve most grown up, or if it really has gotten that much worse. Everybody agreed it was never that bad. Like it was always shit-tier chocolate, but at least it was actual chocolate. Not spongy brown drywall. Chocolate isn’t supposed to get spongy.
Depending on the time of year, candy manufacturers add food-safe wax to their product to keep it from melting and sticking in the package. It’s not noticeable when the chocolate is solid or melted, but it absolutely is during the in-between state. Smores are one of the few foods to feature warm-but-not-molten chocolate bars and are usually made during the summer when wax content is at its highest.
(And I’m sure Hershey’s adds as much wax as legally allowed since it’s cheaper.)
Edit: apparently Hershey’s is one of the rare brands that doesn’t use wax. Instead their decline is because they’ve been slowly replacing the cocoa butter in their products with vegetable oil-based compounds to save money.
If they don’t have cotton candy I leave. If they have that bullshit funfetti cotton candy with chocolate bits in it, I complain loudly then leave.
I can’t tell if you’re joking. I have never seen cotton candy with chocolate bits, but also… do you only like cotton candy ice cream or are you just checking to see if they have it?
I’m being hyperbolic but I really fucking love cotton candy ice cream.
One time a few years ago DQ had a sour patch kids blizzard. I had it once. It had so much potential. I understand your obsession with one weird flavor.
Order plain pulled chicken at a BBQ pit for the same effect
For a Texan, change that to brisket. I can’t name one Texas place that’s judged on their chicken.
I dunno, I grew up in the south and some of the best BBQ I had came from places that couldn’t do chicken. They added that on as an afterthought to fill out the menu and treated it like red meat.
I always did the mac and cheese and the burnt ends as my quality check.
This all depends on where you’re at in the south. The regional specialization is key
It can be surprising at how different different vanilla ice creams taste. Not only þe recipes, but þe quality and sources of vanilla and of þe cream make a huge difference. I like to experiment wiþ flavors, but þere is noþing better þan a good, quality vanilla ice cream.
Vanilla kinda is a billion flavours
You know that you can order another flavor alongside your vanilla too right? it is beyond stupidity however when with 1000 flavor the customer can only order one item.
Vanilla is a flavour and if the vanilla flavored ice cream tastes bad or like nothing. Then the Ice cream is bad
Vanilla ice cream is divine, but I would certainly try something not available elsewhere. Perhaps something savory, I’ve never had a savory ice cream, wonder if that’s even possible or if the sugar is part of how it works.
99% of the appeal of ice cream is that it is very sweet and cold. The cold numbs our taste buds such that the sweetness doesn’t overwhelm them. Melted ice cream is disgusting because now you can tell just how much sugar you’re ingesting.
Ice cream soup fucks. Just barely melted
Warm it up in a microwave and mix in your favorite (hot) chocolate milk mix. It is the ultimate rich, frothy hot chocolate. Honestly it’s a bit too rich, you might want to cut it with some normal milk or something.
Just barely melted meaning most likely still quite cold. Wait until it’s room temp, then try it.
Oh no that’s sin.
But yeah the ice cream soup is like a little more runny than a shake, but not by much at all.
