If you give a kid a hundred yen to buy a treat on a hot summer’s day, he’ll most likely skip off to the candy store to buy himself a Gari Gari Kun, a very popular ice cream bar sold just about anywhere. It is also the preference of many dark jedi. The standard Gari Gari Kun (gari gari is the sound of ice being crunched or scratched, and kun is an informal address aking to ‘boy’) comes in blue packaging and is cream-soda flavored. When it comes to ice cream bars, why give up a good thing?

Because right now, there is a limited-edition cream of corn soup flavored Gari Gari Kun! Gari Gari Kun comes up with different flavored ice cream bars all the time, though they’re usually a special seasonal flavor, like grape or melon. Although there is no season to cream of corn soup, it would be safe to say that cream of corn soup is a standard ‘soup of the day’ for many fancy European restaurants.

When this cream of corn soup flavored Gari Gari Kun appeared in ice cream freezers in stores across Japan on September 4th, we were on it immediately!

We bought one cream of corn flavored Gari Gari Kun, just enough for a taste-test. We promptly cut up the bar into little squares so that everyone could have a bite. We all stood and stared! How quaint! Little squares of frozen cream of corn soup! It suddenly hit us how attractive those creamy squares looked, so we decided to put those delicious looking squares in a pretty glass and suddenly we had a luxurious dessert before us! Was this really that cheap kid’s treat, Gari Gari Kun?

Here’s what we did it:

First, we sliced the ice cream bar in half.

 

Then we cut it up into squares.

 

On tasting this special treat, we were further delighted by the flavor that melted into our mouths. Mmmm! The sweetness was just right! We could picture the stalks, heavy with ears of fat corn, bending with the wind in the fields of Hokkaido as the creamy corn flavor spread across our tongues.

Pleasing to the eye

 

It then occurred to us that if you let it melt you could have a kind of milkshake!

 

Melted gari gari kun in a glass.

 

The creamy texture mixed with the crunchiness of the ice made it a perfect smoothie! Gazpacho aside, soup does not come to mind as an ice cream flavor. But by taking it away from its wrapper and putting it into a glass, a new essence of cream of corn soup is born.

We think a French restaurant could get away with melting this Gari Gari Kun into an expensive looking crystal glass, or slicing it into squares for a decorative dish and serving it as a dessert. Imagine the suave and sophisticated waiter placing it in front of you as he explained with flair, ‘This is our special dessert of the day, cream of corn soup a la Gari Gari Kun!” On giving it a taste, you couldn’t complain, in fact, you would probably hear yourself exclaiming with delight: ‘What an exquisite taste!”

Your dessert is served!

Finally, this translation writer, on a usual trip to the supermarket, looked for a cream of corn soup gari gari kun. There they were!  The usual soda flavored ones lined up prettily in the open freezer area among the ice creams.  But wait!  Those ones next to them don’t say ‘cream of corn’!  They say ‘pear’!  They are already on to the next flavor!  But they must still have SOME of those cream of corn flavored ones left SOMEWHERE!  Keep your eyes open!  You may still be able to experience this unique dish!  Incidentally, the pear was yummy too.
[ Read in Japanese ]