A thousand flavours

The Heladería Coromoto ice cream parlour in Merida, Venezuela offers nearly a thousand different flavours of ice cream, including avocado, garlic, onion, sweetcorn, and crab.

Heladería Coromoto
Claire Taylor from Cyprus / CC BY-SA

I am a big fan of experimental ice cream flavours. In Auckland my local favourite is Giapo’s peach and tomato sorbet with tarragon croutons and freeze-dried olive dust. Some day I hope to visit Heladería Coromoto, an ice cream parlour in Venezuela that has taken ice cream experimentation to the next level.

It all began with an avocado ice cream that was surprisingly popular. (Having tried avocado ice cream myself, I can attest to its deliciousness.) The founder, Manuel da Silva Oliveira, started experimenting with flavours not normally associated with ice cream. Or dessert in general.

So yes, garlic ice cream, sweetcorn ice cream, crab ice cream, and hundreds more. Beef, macaroni and cheese, vodka and pineapple…. You can’t just walk into the store and order any flavour, though: they rotate through the full menu and at any one time only about 60 or so are available.

As far as I can tell Heladería Coromoto is still open. Venezuela is in the midst of a serious economic crisis right now, but this interview (in Spanish) implies that it’s going strong:

(End note: if you want to try some of these flavours but cannot get to South America garlic ice cream is also a feature of the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California, and crab ice cream is available in parts of Japan.)

One Reply to “A thousand flavours”

  1. Or lobster ice cream can be found in Maine, if that’s more accessible to you.

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