d31-ice-cream
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The best ice cream flavour is chocolate
This is a constructed debate, made to demonstrate and test the platform for the case of many participating parties and a great depth of answers.
Every summer the same argument breaks out in our office kitchen, and every summer it ends without anyone changing their mind. I would like to make the case properly this time. Chocolate is the best ice cream flavour, and the reasons for it are not purely a matter of taste. A flavour can be judged by three things, namely whether it is reliable, whether it combines well with others, and whether it survives the walk home from the shop. Chocolate wins on all three counts, and I will take them in turn.
I want to object to the framing rather than to the conclusion. You have chosen three criteria that chocolate happens to satisfy and then declared a winner, which is not an argument, it is a scoreboard designed after the game. If reliability were really the decisive property, we would all be eating industrial vanilla, because that is the flavour with the smallest variance of all.
The scoreboard objection is fair, but it cuts both ways. Any argument about a "best" flavour has to fix its criteria first, and there is no neutral place to stand while doing it. What would you propose instead, a criterion that strawberry satisfies and chocolate does not? I suspect that list is shorter than you would like it to be.
Designing the scoreboard after the game is the oldest move in every flavour argument I have ever witnessed, this one included.
My own candidate is strawberry, and I will defend it against exactly the objection you raise further down. Yes, it is seasonal, and yes, a bad strawberry ice cream is worse than a bad chocolate one. But a flavour that can only be excellent for six weeks a year is still capable of being excellent, and the ceiling matters at least as much as the floor.
Nobody in this thread has said what "best" is supposed to mean. Until that happens we are all just listing our own preferences with extra steps.
I am broadly on your side, but I think you are defending the wrong thing. What you actually describe is not chocolate but cocoa content: a dark chocolate sorbet and a milk chocolate cream have almost nothing in common except the word on the label. If the claim is that chocolate is best, it should survive being made precise, and I do not think it does. Pick a version and defend that one.
"Broadly on your side" is doing a lot of work in a comment that then rejects the entire claim.
Reliability first. A scoop of chocolate tastes roughly the same in a cheap corner shop and in an expensive gelateria, which is emphatically not true of strawberry. Strawberry depends entirely on the fruit, and outside of about six weeks in early summer that fruit simply is not there. Pistachio has the opposite problem. When it is good it is extraordinary, but most of what is sold as pistachio is dyed almond paste. Chocolate has a floor that the other flavours do not have.
This is true and it is also the strongest thing anyone has said in favour of chocolate so far. Seasonality is not a minor inconvenience; it means that for ten months of the year the flavour you are ordering is a reconstruction. Frozen purée, a bit of acid and enough sugar to hide what is missing is not the same product as the one you had in June. The honest version of the strawberry position would be that it is the best flavour of the summer, not the best flavour.
Six weeks is generous; around here it is closer to three.
The seasonality argument proves less than it appears to. Almost every ingredient worth eating is seasonal, and we do not conclude from this that asparagus is worse than tinned sweetcorn. A flavour that is spectacular in season and merely acceptable out of it is not thereby beaten by one that is the same mediocre thing all year round. If anything, the yearly wait is part of why it tastes the way it does.
Comparing ice cream to asparagus is a category error, and I say that as someone who agrees with your conclusion.
The sweetcorn comparison is unfair to chocolate. Nobody is claiming that it is the tinned option; good chocolate ice cream is a made thing, not a preserved one.
Ordering strawberry in February is a decision you make about yourself, not about the flavour.
As the resident pistachio partisan I have to accept the premise and reject the conclusion. Most of what is sold as pistachio is indeed dyed almond paste with a little flavouring, and the bright green colour is a reliable warning sign rather than a selling point. But this is an argument about the market, not about the flavour.
I do not think that distinction survives contact with reality. If nine out of ten scoops sold under a name are bad, then the flavour at its best is something most people will never taste, and a ranking built on it describes a menu nobody can order from. Availability is part of what makes a flavour good, in the same way that a car which only works on a test track is not a good car.
Market or not, I have been burned by green ice cream often enough to stop ordering it.
Judge a flavour by what it is at its best and pistachio is nowhere near being beaten. A proper Sicilian pistachio is savoury, slightly resinous and salty in a way that no chocolate ever manages, and it does not need sugar to carry it. That it is hard to find is a fact about shops. Chocolate is easy to find because it is easy to make passably, which is not the compliment you seem to think it is.
The second point is about combination. Chocolate sits next to almost anything without fighting it, which is why it ends up in every mixed cup that leaves the counter. The third point is the most practical one. Chocolate melts slowly and stays edible, whereas a fruit sorbet turns into coloured water within minutes. I am aware that none of this will convince the vanilla faction, but I would at least like to hear a better argument than "vanilla goes with everything".
This is the point I want to push back on hardest, because I think it is backwards. Chocolate ends up in every mixed cup because it is the default, and being the default is not the same as combining well. Ask what it actually adds next to lemon, or next to a good yoghurt sorbet, and the honest answer is that it flattens both. What you are calling compatibility is mostly dominance.
Pushing back hardest on the weakest of the three points is a strange allocation of effort. The combination argument was clearly the decorative one; reliability and melting behaviour are where the actual claim lives. If you can defeat those, the mixed-cup observation does not matter either way.
I picked it because it is the point that is doing hidden work. Reliability and melting are stated as measurable properties, so they can be argued about in the open, whereas "combines well" quietly assumes that the standard by which combinations are judged is a chocolate-shaped one. The weak points that everyone waves through are exactly the ones worth stopping at.
Every point in every argument is doing hidden work if you are determined enough to find some.
That is a cheap dismissal, and I say that as the person who called the point decorative in the first place. There is a difference between a premise that is merely unstated and one that is unstated because stating it would give the game away. Whether this one is of the second kind is worth ten minutes, even if it is not worth the whole thread.
Thank you, that is roughly what I was trying to say. I would only add that whoever defends a claim rarely gets to decide which of its parts are decorative.
Agreeing with the person who just called your objection cheap is a generous move, and I will take the hint and stop here.
For the record, nobody has said anything about ice cream for six replies now.
Every mixed cup I have ever seen also contains vanilla, which by this reasoning would make vanilla the best flavour.
The melting argument is the only one here that can actually be tested, so I tested it. Two scoops, same cup, same table on the balcony, twenty-five degrees: the chocolate held its shape for about eleven minutes, the raspberry sorbet for four. That is a real difference and it does match your claim. It is also the least interesting property I can imagine ranking a dessert by.
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