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Häagen-Dazs Japan recommends ice cream with tomato and avocado, so we trust them and try it

Casey Baseel May 4, 2019
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But do we regret it?

Being the eminently intelligent individuals that we are, we were pretty confident we’d figured out the ideal process for eating ice cream: put the spoon in the ice cream, then put the spoon in your mouth. But the key to a fulfilling life is always keeping your mind open to new experiences (that involve ice cream).

So when we stumbled across a part of Häagen-Dazs Japan’s official website with suggestions on how to spruce up the company’s offerings for new taste sensations, we decided to give one a shot, and placing our complete faith in Häagen-Dazs’ expertise we tried one we would never have thought of on our own.

Tomato avocado vanilla ice cream.

Häagen-Dazs lists difficulty levels for each of its “ice cream arrangement” recipes, and tomato avocado vanilla ice cream is designated as Level 1, the easiest to prepare, and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. The ingredients are:

● One individual-sized container of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream
● Avocado (amount: as much as you’d like)
● Tomato (amount: as much as you’d like)

Once you’ve assembled the ingredients, all you have to do is slice the tomato and avocado, then place them atop the ice cream. There are no other steps or seasonings.

Since you’ll be eating them with a spoon, it’s best to chop the veggies into small, bite-sized pieces. We opted for cherry tomatoes, figuring their extra sweetness, compared to full-size tomatoes, would go well with the ice cream. We started chopping, and once we had our pieces, we gently wiped the tomato chunks with a paper towel to remove the surface-area moisture and keep our ice cream from getting soggy. Once we’d cut up the avocado as well, we sprinkled everything onto our open container of Häagen-Dazs.

We’ve got to admit, the resulting combination looks really nice. The contrast with the white ice cream really makes the red and green of the tomato and avocado pop, and visually this color scheme would look great at a Christmas party.

Then it was time to taste our creation, and as we lifted the first spoonful to our lips and took a bite…

…we were amazed by how smooth and creamy the tomato and avocado tasted…or at least we thought we were. Then we took another bite and realized that the refreshing cream notes were actually just the vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream, which itself was as delicious as ever.

As such, it’s hard to say whether Häagen-Dazs’ idea is crazy-good, or just crazy. On the one hand, it didn’t blow our minds with a paradigm-altering assault on our taste buds, but on the other hand, it wasn’t bad either, and it definitely had a sophisticated, gourmet feel to it.

Ordinarily, we’d use the dessert’s health aspects as a tie-breaker, but even that’s not such a simple thing to do here. If you think of Häagen-Dazs’ recipe as adding ice cream to vegetables, it’s extremely bad for you, as you’re basically substituting ice cream for salad dressing. On the other hand, if you consider this to be a case of adding vegetables to ice cream, instead of, say, chocolate chips or hot fudge, then you’re actually coming out ahead in terms of nutrition, especially if having one scoop of ice cream with veggies on top instead of two scoops of ice cream with no toppings. And in any case, it still tastes better than vanilla ice cream topped with dried shrimp.

Related: Häagen-Dazs
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