A tasty cure for the summertime blues

What’s your favourite ice cream flavour?  A quick poll I took of Japanese kids revealed banira (vanilla) to be the undisputed champion.  Which surprised me.  In English slang, after all, vanilla-flavoured has come to mean boring.  Anyway, what do kids know.  Chocolate is obviously the best flavour.

I didn’t find out about it until it was already over, so alas could not attend, but July and August saw the Ice Cream Expo in Yokohama.

And while all the ordinary fare was on offer, there wouldn’t be much point in an expo if all that was on offer was what you could find down at the supermarket.

But in terms of innovative (weird) flavours, it went far beyond the passé basashi (raw horse meat – a Kumamoto delicacy) and wasabi (that vicious green cross between horseradish and semtex).

Otaku International has a report with a focus on the more outlandish – octopus, squid, caviar, chicken wings, the foul and dreadful natto, mamushi (the deadly pit viper) (I’ll just repeat that – the deadly pit viper), and the star of the show, ox tongue.

‘Chuwy’ visited the expo and tried a good number of the ice creams on offer, and wrote up his thoughts at the entertaining Chuwy Thoughts.

There are some more photos available in a Mainichi gallery.