We’ve reviewed a lot of nachos here at Nachonomics. Nachos with every meat under the sun, and every vegetable under the ground. Nachos for the best of times, nachos for the worst of times. Nachos you can eat with a fox, and nachos you can eat in a box. Yes, we’ve had nachos for breakfast, nachos for lunch, and nachos for dinner, but never once nachos for dessert. Until now.
The "Doggie Dish" was also very hard to resist.
Located in the tiny village of Hammondsport, NY, at the south end of Keuka Lake, Crooked Lake Ice Cream Company has been slinging ice cream for more than 30 years. What was known to me was that if I walked in I would get some tasty ice cream, which I was in the mood for, but what wasn’t was that I could also have said ice cream in nacho form. While Ice Cream Nachos were a hypothesized order of dish, they were not something I had ever seen in the wild, like a whale shark or a Mongolian death worm. I ordered some and took a seat in their coffin themed booths to get my nom on.
Coffin seats for frozen treats!
Let’s get this straight, the ice cream was delicious, and when you sundaeify it with whipped cream and cherries and toppings it only gets better and better. I’m not typically one to go for a cone when I can just get my ice cream in a cup, because I’m watching my weight and counting my calories of course. When I do though, it’s a waffle cone, and if it’s a cinnamon waffle cone like the chips used here, that’s about as good as it gets. So the ice cream and the cone, both fantastic, but what about the overall nachoness of it?
You know when you pull a container of ice cream out of the freezer and try to get a scoop of it out, but all you end up doing is bending your metal spoon? Now imagine trying to do that with a piece of waffle cone instead of a spoon. Doesn’t work out too great, and that is the problem here. You get two great scoops of ice cream, but you can’t eat them as if you were eating nachos, you need to resort to the spoon. Not CLICC’s problem, just the inherent problem of the phase transition of freezing cream.
So how do you make an authentically nacho order of ice cream nachos? You can’t go with the scoop method, that’s a game for cones. To be truly effective and chipable you need your ice cream just skimmed over so the result is a soft, ice cream chip slice, an ice cream snowflake if you will. Those fancy cold rolled ice cream places you’ll find in your mall (assuming your local mall is still open) would make it at just the right size and consistency, but alas, they’re not the ones selling the nachos. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try these ice cream nachos, but you might just well as well get some ice cream in a waffle cone and make it easier to eat. Either way you win, because they’re both great, but one way doesn’t require a spoon.
Honestly, an order of nachos, a few scoops of ice cream, I couldn't tell you which is less healthy.