This is the latest installment of Foodie Underground.
Salted caramel ice cream. Orange coriander ice cream. Sweet summer corn buttermilk sherbert.
The whole put-anything-you-can-find-and-see-if-it-works-in-ice-cream-trend is tasty at times, edgy at best, but has become so ubiquitous that off-color flavors rarely merit a reaction.
That was until I saw the geoduck ice cream sign.
I was driving home to my parents' house, a big yellow house nestled somewhere between some trees and a few salt water bays in the Puget Sound. I had taken the backroads to avoid traffic, which entailed driving through a quaint, waterfront town of Allyn. There is a knitting store that we go to in the winter, a burger joint in the summer and a small dock to walk on. A good afternoon excursion on the days when you need to spice up country life.
Windows down, music blaring I slowed down to the required 35 miles per hour and took in the sea salt air of home. I was going slow enough that the sign was hard to miss.
"Geo Duck Ice Cream." Right below the "Fresh Peach Sunda." Who needs the "y" anyway?
I'm sorry... what?
I was tired of driving and didn't have the energy to turn around, but I was so shocked that anyone would ever dare make ice cream out of Washington State's most treasured/hated shellfish that I made a mental note of the sign, and told myself that before the week was up I would have to return.
For those who aren't well versed on the geoduck, it's a shellfish that happens to be the largest bivalve along Puget Sound. In laymen's terms: it has a three foot-long neck and looks pretty gross. But we kind of have a thing for them up in Washington. A sort of love/hate affair. The Chinese certainly love them, which means they're good for the economy, and Evergreen State College thinks they're so great that they've even made mascot status.
A Washington native, I had personally never tried one. But this was the summer of "just say yes" policy. It's a travel policy that I try to stick to, even when travel means returning to my home state. And of course, even when it means tasting geoduck ice cream. Fortunately my good friend Dave had come up for the weekend, and as my regular co-host of dinner parties and lover of all things food related, I knew he had to be up for the challenge.
"I am so glad you wanted to go do this with me," I said, after parking in Allyn and walking up to the small Olympic Mountain Ice Cream shop.
"I didn't say I wanted to do this," he responded.
Right.
It should be noted that when you walk into an ice cream shop featuring geoduck ice cream with two cameras in hand, it's sort of obvious what you want to order.
"Oh, there's the cream kind and a sorbet," I said, wondering why in God's name you would make two variations of the stuff.
"Well, the cream based one is a stronger one. A really strong geoduck taste with butter. That's what we recommend for people that really like geoduck." said the young woman working behind the ice cream counter. I tried hard not to visibly shudder. "The other one has a really good lime taste and is a little lighter because it's a sorbet," she continued. "You really should test both."
And that was how Dave and I came to be standing with test spoons of geoduck ice cream and sorbet.
A normal person would of course try the samples, pat themselves on the back, kindly say "that was interesting, but I think I am good," and continue on their merry way. Not in my case. I was just off a week of picking backyard blackberries, muddling them with basil simple syrup and baking almond, cardamom, red currant scones for breakfast. I had to switch things up. You can only go the mason jar and sea salt route for so long.
"Well, we have to get a full scoop... it is what we came here to do," I looked at Dave somehow trying to coax some encouragement from him.
"Ok, fine, a cup," he said.
$2.71 later and we had ourselves a styrofoam (I know, I know) cup of lime geoduck sorbet. The things you do for a culinary experience.
If you're wondering what geoduck sorbet tastes like, it's simple: a delightful, zesty dose of sweet lemon, lime flavor, followed by a really weird infusion of chewy geoduck, which really just tastes like a bad clam. No really, it's sorbet with small pieces of geoduck in it. As Dave put it after we both agreed that despite our hatred of food waste, we simply couldn't finish the thing, "I only had one meal, I really should have been able to eat more of that."
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