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The crawfish ice cream is only offered for a limited time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chyna Blackmon<\/p>\n
At an ice cream shop<\/a>, you typically find strawberry, vanilla, or maybe something trendy like Dubai chocolate. But just in time for crawfish season<\/a>, one Houston ice cream shop has rolled out a gooey, garlicky flavor, garnished with spices and topped with a chilled, crimson crustacean. For the seventh year in a row, the specialty crawfish ice cream has returned to Red Circle Ice Cream<\/a> at 6838 Ranchester Dr.<\/p>\n With garlic butter dripping down her fingers during a crawfish boil with her family, owner Nickey Ngo remembered thinking, “I can make this into an ice cream flavor.” And not a classic vanilla with Cajun seasoning sprinkled on top. She meant a new sweet, savory and spicy flavor reminiscent of a pound of steaming crawfish you\u2019d find at a backyard boil.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n “Thinking outside the box, I always try to create flavors that are unique, but at the same time that taste good\u2026 and flavor profiles that nobody has had in Houston,” Ngo told Chron.<\/p>\n While traditional Louisiana-style boils are heavily blended with dry spices and seasonings, Viet-Cajun style is boiled and tossed with more amounts of melted butter and fresh garlic\u2014a mixture of flavors front and center in Red Circle\u2019s ice cream. But, in Ngo\u2019s words, the crawfish concoction is not for the faint of heart. So she always gives curious customers the same, specific advice when ordering the ice cream: Take a chaser (aka a sample of a sweeter, traditional flavor) and don\u2019t kiss anyone afterwards. And for a bit of added fun, break off the crawfish tail and use it as a spoon.<\/p>\n Crawfish ice cream from Red Circle Ice Cream.<\/p>\n Chyna Blackmon<\/p>\n “The ice cream, itself, does not have crawfish bits in there, because no one wants to eat frozen bits of seafood. So that’s what we top it with the crawfish, and then you eat the crawfish and the flavorings that are seasoned with the actual ice cream,” Ngo said.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n As Ngo explained, “I just so happened to be eating some Viet-Cajun crawfish, so I was like, ‘Okay, I know what I’ve got to put in here.’ The secret ingredient to make it so creamy and so popping is butter\u2014lots and lots of butter\u2014so when you taste the crawfish, it’s not so salty. That butter makes it super creamy and adds a little bit of that sweetness as well, and it gives it that richness that you taste from the sauce when you eat crawfish.”<\/p>\n The local dessert shop, known for its creative ice creams, churros and “Puffalicious” waffles, has created more than 100 specialty flavors since opening in Sharptown\u2019s Chinatown in 2017.<\/p>\n With a mission to make their menu a “fusion of flavors,” Red Circle has four core flavors: chocolate, vanilla, Vietnamese coffee and Elmo crunch. Otherwise, the handcrafted ice cream lineup is constantly changing with new flavors rolling out, including horchata, lychee strawberry, Thai tea and the upcoming mango sticky rice flavor served by the scoop, with churros or macarons.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Red Circle Ice Cream debuted the sweet and spicy crawfish flavor for the first time in spring 2019. Since then, it\u2019s been a limited-time Spring Break special launched during peak crawfish season for about a week every year. Despite the demand, Ngo says she doesn\u2019t foresee herself keeping on the menu permanently. Simply because she likes keeping it as something for foodies to look forward to each spring.<\/p>\n “This makes me feel so humbled and so blessed that people have come in and really wanted to try it,” Ngo said. “We’ve gotten some haters, of course \u2026 We were blasted when we first launched this flavor. They were like, ‘No, call the police. We’re gonna burn your store down.’ But it really made a lot of people excited, because they were like, \u2018What in the world is? What are they doing?\u2019 It piqued everyone’s interest, they came and a lot of people loved it.”<\/p>\n Red Circle Ice Cream has multiple locations around the Houston-area, but only the Chinatown location at 6838 Ranchester Dr. is currently offering the crawfish flavor.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The crawfish ice cream is only offered for a limited time.\u00a0 Chyna Blackmon At an ice cream shop,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1703,1704,56,58,57],"class_list":["post-224739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-chronfood","tag-chronstaff","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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