The Unusual Ice Cream Flavours Worth Knowing: Weird, Rare and Unique

Unusual ice cream flavours have a bad reputation, and most of it is earned. Most weird ice cream flavours are weird for the sake of it, and a counter that puts bacon and bubblegum beside each other is usually chasing a photograph, not a flavour. But the good ones are not weird for the sake of it: they are built on the same three levers every scoop is built on, which are fat, sugar and salt, and they use an unfamiliar ingredient to push one of the three further than a familiar one could.

Olive oil and sea salt is the clearest example of what weird ice cream flavours can do when somebody has thought about them. Fat carries flavour and holds it on the palate, so a good olive oil lengthens a scoop the way cream does, while salt sharpens the sweetness around it. Nothing about that is a gimmick. The same logic explains black sesame, which behaves like a toasted nut, and chilli with chocolate, which is older than the ice cream it now sits in.

Rare flavours you will only meet in one city

Some rare ice cream flavours never travel, because the ingredient does not. Sambayon, built on egg yolk and sweet wine, is on nearly every board in Buenos Aires and almost none in London. Black sesame is everywhere in Tokyo and rare outside it. Corn appears across Peru and Mexico and is treated as an oddity elsewhere, which says more about the elsewhere than about the corn.

Rarity on its own is not a recommendation. A flavour can be rare because it is difficult, because the fruit has a two-week season, or simply because nobody has bothered. The rare ice cream flavours worth the detour are the first kind.

Unique combinations with a real idea behind them

The most interesting entries are pairings rather than single ingredients. Basil with lemon works because basil is a soft herb with a sweet edge and citrus keeps it from turning soapy. Black fig with balsamic works because aged vinegar is sweet before it is sour. Neither is unique in the sense of never having been done. They are unique in the sense that the two halves need each other.

That is the whole test for unusual ice cream flavours, and it is simple enough to apply at a counter. Ask what the second ingredient is doing. If the answer is a colour or a texture, it is decoration. If the answer is that it fixes something about the first ingredient, it is a flavour. The five where the mechanism is clearest are set out on the combinations page.

How the unusual ice cream flavours list is grouped

The list of unusual ice cream flavours below runs to six groups and twenty-eight entries. Herbal and floral flavours lean on aromatics. Savoury ones borrow from the kitchen rather than the pastry section. Spiced flavours use heat as a finish. Bitter ones use it as a counterweight. Nut and seed flavours carry fat. Fruit and vegetable ones carry acid and water, which is the hardest thing to get right in a frozen dessert.

A note on where these are found. The list is not a directory, and none of these flavours belongs to one shop. Several of them turn up on the same board in Buenos Aires that carries four versions of dulce de leche, which is covered on the Argentine helado page. The stranger end of the same subject sits on the crazy flavours list.