Ice Cream Flavors: A Deep Dive
By Chan Yat Sum 5D
It is interesting to me that chocolate ice cream was invented before vanilla ice cream. I have always thought of vanilla ice cream as being the original flavor. It was only after doing research for this article that I realized chocolate is the original flavor! But why chocolate?
An Ice Cream Man in 1920.
According to a YouGov survey, about 17% of people choose chocolate flavored ice cream over everything. This is a huge percentage of people! If you consider just how many flavors there are in the world, and then see that one in five people globally only choose chocolate, you realize that it completely dominates the ice cream flavor-spectrum.
Global Ice Cream Flavor Preferences.
The chocolate we eat today is sweet, but it was originally bitter. Many hundreds of years ago the people of South America would drink hot, bitter chocolate with spices, much like how we drink coffee today. When the Spanish attacked them and colonized the continent, the Spaniards drank the hot chocolate.... but they didn’t like it! So it was the Spanish who added sugar to the chocolate to make it sweet.
Raw cocoa beans.
How strange, that chocolate as we know it today is so far from its original form. This leads me to wonder how this sweetened chocolate became so popular. If we think of plain ice cream, we might think of vanilla ice cream. This is actually incorrect! As mentioned earlier, chocolate ice cream came before vanilla. My personal theory is that ice cream and sweet chocolate are just an incredible combination - so it makes sense that it would be at the top of the list.
Chocolate Ice Cream - The original Ice Cream Flavor.
But don't take my word for it. Experts said if you eat 30 to 60 grams of chocolate every day, it is good for your heart. Chocolate and its main ingredient, cocoa, appear to reduce risk factors for heart disease. So even the scientists are chocolate enthusiasts!
Maya Warren is an ice cream scientist. What a cool job!
It's hard to say for sure why people insist on chocolate ice cream. One thing for sure is my knowledge of chocolate, and ice cream, and chocolate ice cream, wasn't as good as I thought!