The Range Of Ice Cream Flavors

This is where ice cream comes into its own compared to other foods! The variety of flavors is seemingly endless, from the simple to the exotic to the most unusual.

Vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream are amongst the most traditional and will always be popular. If you like vanilla ice cream and want to make your own here is my favorite vanilla ice cream recipe. I also made a video of me making vanilla ice cream but using a slightly different recipe - custard base and vanilla extract for flavoring. Other traditional flavors include banana, chocolate chip and honey.

Fruits are always a good bet for ice cream making. Some are better for rich, creamy ice creams, others are better for sorbets and a few, such as rhubarb, are great for both! Check out my creamy rhubarb and custard ice cream recipe and also my recipe for rhubarb sorbet here.

Nuts play a great part in flavoring ice cream too – one of the most popular nuts is the pecan. Here's my butter pecan recipe. There's also of course the ever popular nut flavor ice cream of pistachio for which I have a great recipe.

Herbs make wonderful flavorings for homemade ice cream. Mint, lavender, rosemary and even bay leaves are great to infuse flavor into the milk after heating up in the first part of the custard making process. Fresh mint flavor is one of my favorite herb ice cream recipes.

Spices and ice cream … well it doesn’t get any better in my view! Vanilla and ginger are the two most popular spice ice cream flavors of course and I like to use cinammon and cloves sometimes too. Try my recipe for honey, cinammon and cloves ice cream.

Then there’s a whole world of unusual flavorings to try – avocados, prunes, fresh coffee, green tea, honey, marmalade, brown bread … the list goes on.

Alcohol too can be used well in sorbet recipes – try a white wine sorbet for example.  Note: when using alcohol in an ice cream recipe, bear in mind that the end product will be softer and that it will take longer to freeze as alcohol lowers the freezing point of anything it’s added to.

There's so much to read and learn about flavors in ice cream - my top 10 ice cream page gives a great insight into what's really popular around the world with one or two interesting flavors in the list! In my blog I'm constantly writing about ice cream flavors such as this post here written way back in 2007. From that date alone you can tell how much passion I have for all things ice cream.

Other pages that might provide you with more useful information are here: Popular Flavors ~ Unusual Flavors. If one thing is for sure it's that there's never been as many flavors of ice cream to enjoy but equally certain is that there are probably still a lot more to come in the future. Such is the scope for imaginative creativity with ice cream. Let's keep new flavors rolling in.