Chocolate is the champion – Alix Bryant
Chocolate is one of the most amazing and versatile foods. It is delicious by itself as a snack, but it can also be paired with fruit, nuts, pretzels, or other types of candy like caramel, or peanut butter. But above all else, chocolate takes it most glorious form in ice cream.
Chocolate ice cream has the perfect arrangement of sweet, sugary, and savory flavor. With the first bite you’re instantly hooked into a chocolatey paradise, where all your problems are non-existent and your happiness is heightened. You can be the person who eats it slowly and really makes it last, or you can be like me and shovel it into your mouth and eat it as fast as humanly possible and get a second bowl as soon as you’re done.
It is also a very buildable flavor. Chocolate alone is incredible, but once you add some chocolate jimmies, Oreos, hot fudge, or chocolate chips, then you experience chocolate ice cream on a whole new level. With vanilla ice cream you need the toppings to actually bring some flavor. Vanilla has a flat, sweet, and plain taste. It is average at best and does not evoke the same feelings that chocolate does. I don’t even think vanilla can compare to chocolate.
Have you ever had an ice cream sundae? If you haven’t, they typically include a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream, with some sort of syrup, sprinkles, nuts, whipped cream, and cherries. These toppings can make a great addition to a dessert, but when with all these additions you can’t even taste the vanilla flavor. Everything on top hides the vanilla instead of highlighting it. Putting all of those toppings on top of chocolate ice cream would not only bring out the chocolate flavor, but would also amplify all the other flavors as well, making it an amazing edible experience.
My favorite way to eat chocolate ice cream is to put it in a cup and add a little milk and stir it until becomes a nice and smooth consistency. At this point you basically have a chocolate shake. Then you can cut a large amount of Oreos and add them to your shake and then add a little chocolate sauce to make a stronger chocolate flavor.
Why not eat an ice cream that tastes amazing but literally makes you happy? Vanilla can’t even compete. But what can I say? I’m in love with the cocoa.
Vanilla is for victorious – Edward Kdonian
When it comes to ice cream flavors there is a lot of variety. Some like butter pecan, others mint chocolate chip. One flavor however rises above the rest as number one. That flavor is vanilla. The most popular flavor of ice cream in America, according to the international dairy foods association, this decadent treat is flavored using the world’s second most expensive spice.
The vanilla bean, which is actually a pod, comes from the only variety of orchids used for industrial food production. Vanilla is labor intensive to produce, and pods can be left to dry for up to six months, according to an article by Alison Spiegel, a food writer and editor of The Huffington Post.
All that time and work is worth it, though, in order to create the naturally sweet and incredibly versatile flavor. A flavor that not only tastes amazing on its own, but helps to make any flavor more complex and delicious.
That’s right, even chocolate ice cream usually uses vanilla flavoring in its recipe. Don’t believe me? Google it. I’ll wait. That’s right, all of those recipes you just found called for vanilla didn’t they? That’s because vanilla makes everything better.
No matter how much more palatable chocolate comes with the help of vanilla, it will never match up to plain vanilla as an ice cream flavor. When it comes to the frozen flavor sensation that is ice cream, vanilla acts as the perfect accompaniment to all its lesser brothers.
Vanilla, unlike chocolate, can mingle cohesively with any flavor, rather than taking it over and stealing the show. Chocolate doesn’t go well with other flavors, other flavors go well with chocolate. Put simply, chocolate is the glory hog of the flavor kingdom.
When it comes to playing in the ice cream sandbox, chocolate is the bully who forces everyone else to play the game he wants. Vanilla, on the other hand, is the naturally friendly, and handsome, guy who makes sure to include everyone equally. Vanilla doesn’t showboat, and it doesn’t beg to be the center of attention.
You didn’t see anyone in Willy Wonka falling into a river of vanilla did you? No. You saw a greedy chocolate monger feeding an unnatural addiction to a substance that’s only made tolerable by the addition of a mountain of sugar and a bucket of fat. Chocolate, unlike vanilla with its natural sweetness, is born a bitter, unpalatable, substance that without human intervention is barely edible.
Those of us with more evolved palates know the truth. The king of ice cream flavors is Vanilla, and in the words of Wallace Stevens, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”