A combination we’d never imagined, but is it one we’ll want to forget?

The stock called dashi is one of the most ubiquitous ingredients in Japanese cooking. Made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes), dashi can be found in miso soup, the broths for udon and soba noodles, and even as an ingredient in non-soups such as oyakodon (chicken and egg bowl) and gyudon (beef bowl).

However, you usually won’t find dashi in ice cream. We say “usually,” though, because ice cream with dashi in it is exactly what we found recently in Niigata Prefecture.

While walking through the CoCoLo shopping center attached to Niigata Station in Niigata City, our Japanese-language reporter Udonko stopped to browse at On the Umami, a dashi specialty shop. Udonko, who’s from Niigata, had previously picked up some dashi packets at On the Umami and was amazed by how well the soup she made from them turned out, so she was thinking about grabbing a few more, or maybe trying some of their dashi mixes that you pour into your rice cooker along with the grains.

But all those thoughts were suddenly overpowered when Udonko saw the shop’s poster for Dashi Soft Serve Ice Cream (だしソフト).

And no, “dashi” isn’t being used here as a tongue-in-cheek term for something else. This ice cream really does contain dashi, with the poster boasting that it’s a blend of three different types of kombu dashi.

At 400 yen (US$2.70), this is just a bit on the pricey side for a cup of takeout soft serve, but considering that in all the years Udonko has been on this planet she’s never once come across dashi ice cream, she figured it could be equally as long until her next opportunity to taste it, and so she decided to give it a try.

On the Umami doesn’t have its own eat-in space, but Udonko found a rest area not far from the shop where she could snap some photos and do her taste-testing. Visually, the Dashi Soft Serve is quite beautiful, a bright white with just the right amount of enticing contouring, with no appearance quirks that would give you reason to suspect it’s made with such an unorthodox ingredient.

The fact that it looks like regular ice cream, though, made it all the more difficult to predict how it would taste. Would it be sweet like a dessert, salty like seafood, or something else entirely?

But the old adage that “the first bite is with the eyes” is meant metaphorically, so the only way for Udonko to get the answer she sought was to take a bite with the mouth…

…and was greeted by a fantastically creamy milk flavor!

Thinking back to the poster for the Dashi Soft Serve, aside from the dashi, it also mentioned that it’s made with milk from Guernsey-breed cows. There are only about 300 Guernsey cows in all of Japan, and only 20 of them in the Niigata town of Nagaoka, where the ice cream sources its milk from. Guernsey milk is praised for having a rich flavor yet a clean finish, and those qualities shine through in the Dashi Soft Serve too.

As for the dashi, it waits a while to make its presence felt. It was hard to notice at first, but as the ice cream began to melt a bit, Udonko could feel her tongue’s salt receptors starting to wake up. On the Umami has wisely deduced that ice cream fans don’t want the flavor of their sweet treat to be predominantly dashi, and so that element hangs in the background, but still builds to a gentle saltiness that helps accentuate and draw out more of the cream’s sweetness, Udonko says.

So while the concept had Udonko’s mouth agape in shock, the result left her with a smile on her face and the knowledge that ice cream and dashi can be a combination that’s at least as tasty as coffee and sesame oil.

Shop information
On the Umami
Address: Niigata-ken, Niigata-shi, Chuo-ku, Hanazono 1-1-1, JR Niigata Station building CoCoLo Niigata 2nd floor East Side
新潟県新潟市中央区花園1-1-1 JR新潟駅構内 CoCoLo NIIGATA 2F EAST SIDE
Open 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]