Similar to pineapple going on pizza, pickles are one of the foods that can divide a dinner table with differing opinions — you either love it or you hate it. Most people on FoodTok seem to love pickles, prompting brands to create unique products to keep up with the trends, resulting in offerings such as Spicy Dill Pickle Goldfish and Late July’s pickle lemonade-flavored tortilla chips.
Rad Rolled Ice Cream, an award-winning Australian ice cream shop in the state of Queensland, is now taking the food debate one step further with their new experiment of pickle-flavored ice cream, creating a friendly fracture of opinions on the strange flavor.
The invention of the pickle-flavored ice cream all started when shop owner Cam Thomas’ wife, Crystal, challenged Thomas to try to make an ice cream out of crispy pickle chips, inspired by the social media trend of including pickles in different dishes.
“I said, well, pickle me pink, let’s give it a shot!” Thomas reminisced while laughing in an interview with 7NEWS Australia.
Thomas’ video, posted on @radrolledicecream on TikTok on September 14, featured his process of making the new rolled ice cream flavor.
He began the video with the two major questions he wanted to answer with the experiment: “Do they roll and do they taste good?”
To make the ice cream, Thomas first dumped several pickle chips — or “crisps,” as they say in Australia — on a cold plate, which is used to make rolled ice cream. He then poured a vanilla ice cream mixture onto the cold plate as well, quickly chopping up the pickle chips and mixing them into the vanilla ice cream.
“I’m just gonna put it out there — I hate pickles,” Thomas admitted while mixing the ingredients together with a flat spatula in each hand.
After the pickle chip pieces were small enough and thoroughly incorporated into the mixture, he used the flat spatulas to spread a thin layer of the mixture across the cold plate to freeze it enough to roll.
Thomas’ first question was positively answered when the pickle chip ice cream rolled into the classic rolled ice cream cylindrical spirals with ease. “Does it roll? Yes it does, very well,” he said, topping the five pickle ice cream rolls in a cup with a mound of whipped cream and, of course, a couple of pickle crisps.
Thomas offered the first taste of the new crispy pickle chip ice cream to a customer. After a moment of tasting deliberation, the customer rated the ice cream a whopping 9.5/10. “I thought this was gonna be an absolute flop,” Thomas said in surprise.
Clearly, pickle ice cream isn’t for everyone though — not even the creator of it himself. Per his disclaimer of hating pickles, Thomas’ reaction to tasting his new creation was predictable enough. “That is bloody terrible,” he said.
Thomas’ opinion seems to be the less popular one though, as people have flocked to Rad Rolled Ice Cream to get a taste of the pickle chip ice cream themselves.
“Sweet and savory, it can’t be that bad, right?” said one customer waiting outside to try the ice cream.
“If it’s ice cream, I will eat it,” another customer told 7NEWS Australia. “But it doesn’t rate with lemon,” he added, deeming the pickle chip ice cream as incomparable to his ultimate favorite ice cream flavor of lemon.
It seems like pickle ice cream isn’t for everyone, but customers in Australia are definitely willing to give it a try for its novelty.