THE BATTLE OF THE ICE CREAMS

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In THE BATTLE OF THE COOL SAUCY DIPS, barbecue sauce was the clear winner of the poll, with guacamole coming well behind in second place.

It's now the turn of ice creams or, more precisely, flavours of ice cream to do battle! Sorry @smartasswoman, I'm not taking a rest from the battle of food polls!

This poll closely follows @EnigmaInitiative's poll, Court of Aff Opinion 57, also on ice cream! One can never have too much ice cream especially on a hot summer's day, not that there's any hot days this summer here in Britain! In researching this post, it seems the Americans, Italians and Japanese particularly love their ice cream.

There are reportedly well over a thousand different flavours of ice cream. Don't worry, I'm not going to list them all! Any food and drink, even grapes, can be turned into an ice cream flavour. One chef concocted soil ice cream, made from soil found in the earth and not so-called chocolate soil. Another chef, Heston Blumenthal, pioneered bacon-and-egg ice cream. My guess is that some chef has even made semen ice cream!

In Japan, golden ice cream (aka kinpaku) is a popular ice cream - it's ice cream served with gold leaf! However, the world's most expensive ice cream is byakura, an ice cream made with white truffles from Alba in Italy, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese also from Italy, and the lees (deposits of dead yeast) in making Japanese sake. Your's for well over £5,000, that's over $6,000, €6,000 or ¥800,000 just for two scoops!

Just to make this poll manageable, I'm only going to include single-flavoured ice creams, not combinations of flavoured ice creams like cassata, cherry vanilla, Neapolitan, raspberry ripple and tutti frutti ice cream. Also I'm not including ice creams with bits in, on or with it like birthday cake, butter pecan, cake batter, chocolate chip cookie dough, mint chocolate chip, moose tracks, rocky road and rum and raisin ice cream

When I mean a single flavour, I don't just mean a flavour from a single ingredient, like chocolate, strawberry and vanilla ice cream. The poll also includes flavours made from a combination of ingredients, but the ingredients have to be blended together before serving and eating the ice cream. So beer, bubble gum, gin and tonic, miso, mocha and salted caramel ice cream are included, but apple crumble, bacon maple, chile con queso, chocolate peanut butter, cookies n' cream, cotton candy, maple crunch, Philadelphia cheese steak, pralines n' cream, and strawberry cheesecake ice cream are excluded. I know it's a bit arbitrary but a line has to be drawn somewhere!

My favourite ice cream flavours are butterscotch, cherry, chocolate, coconut, lemon, mango, melon, mint, orange, peach, raspberry, salted caramel, strawberry, toffee and vanilla. But my most favourite ice cream flavour is pistachio, especially a pistachio kulfi - see photo below. Kulfi is an Indian ice cream, a bit more creamy than Western ice cream and great to eat to cool down after devouring a very hot curry.

In my book, there's really no such thing as bad ice cream. But my least favourite ice cream, despite being a coffee addict, is coffee ice cream. There are many ice cream flavours I haven't tried which don't appeal to me - for example, I wouldn't be tempted to eat caviar, chicken wing, horse meat, lobster, miso, oyster, shark's fin and squid ink ice cream. But I'd give Brussels sprout, cucumber, curry, mushroom, mustard and soil ice cream a try though. I'd even go so far as to suggest a pervy cucumber ice cream contest should be organised in blogland!

What are your most and least favourite ice cream flavours?
If you were offered three scoops of ice cream, what flavours would you choose?
Have you made or do you make your own ice cream?

Below is a poll where you can anonymously select your most favourite ice cream flavour. Unfortunately only one pick is allowed in the poll.

A poll on this site can only have 20 answer options. There was no room for adzuki bean, almond, apple, apricot, beer, beetroot, bilberry, blackberry, blackcurrant, Brussels sprout, bubble gum, butterscotch, cabbage (including red cabbage and swamp cabbage), cactus, carrot, cassava, cauliflower, caviar, Champagne, charcoal, cheese (including cream cheese), chicken wing, cranberry, cream, cucumber, curry, damson, eggnog, fudge, gin and tonic, ginger (including stem ginger), grape, hazelnut, hojicha (roasted green tea), honey (including salted honey), horse meat, Irish cream (eg Baileys), kinako (roasted soybean flour), lavender, lime, lobster, maple syrup, marshmallow (including toasted marshmallow), miso, mocha, mulberry, mushroom, mustard (eg American, English and French mustard), oyster, panna cotta, passion fruit, peanut (including peanut butter), pineapple, plum, potato, prune, red bean, redcurrant, rhubarb, rice, sake, sakura (cherry blossom), sesame (aka goya; including black sesame), shark's fin, shirasu (young sardine eels), smoked salmon, soba (soba noodles), soda, soil, soy sauce, squid ink (aka ikasumi), sweet and sour sauce, sweet corn (or corn), sweet potato (including purple sweet potato (aka murasaki imo)), teaberry, tomato, ube (or purple yam), wasabi, whiskey/whisky and wine ice cream. But there is always the 'other' option for those ice cream flavours not listed. Hopefully I've covered all the popular flavours of ice cream as poll options.

If I had a choice of three scoops of ice cream in a dish, I'd choose vanilla, chocolate and pistachio. I'd dither with my choice because there's also mango and mint to think of. Bur fuck the calories, I'm going for a greedy five-scoop! I've never made ice cream; it seems difficult.

I think vanilla will win the poll, but chocolate and strawberry flavours won't be too far behind. May the best ice cream win!

I want to thank both @EnigmaInitiative, @hippiechick1967 and @JN63JPN for their very helpful suggestions in compiling this poll. But any mistakes are of course mine.

Please see the first comment below to see what has won each battle so far.

Pistachio kulfi:

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