Tirol Chocolate – Salty Vanilla Ice Cream
When I was much younger, I played a wonderful little game known as Kingdom Hearts. In the game there were scenes of certain characters enjoying something called sea salt ice cream. It was this vibrant, light blue ice cream bar that somehow seemed very enticing, and yet kind of weird when you think about it. Salty ice cream?? But that doesn’t stop the mind from wondering what it would be like. Now this isn’t anywhere close to that, but salty vanilla ice cream seems like a nice, easy way to ease into the world of salted ice creams. I mean, we already do salted caramel and salt with chocolate, why not ice cream too?
The flavour is indeed a strong vanilla, with only a hint of something salty in the aftertaste. Sort of like it’s following very closely, but not close enough you would consider them to be in the same car. The chocolate is vanilla flavoured, while the marshmallow is what I would describe as vanilla inspired or vanilla adjacent. It’s got a slight flavour but it’s hard to tell if that’s from the chocolate or it’s just a generic sweet puff of air. It almost feels like the salt was added in a way to help someone replenish electrolytes, than to flavour. Sort of like those new fancy water machines that let you add electrolytes and vitamins to your drink.
The texture is what I believe to be a marshmallow center. The chocolate shell gives way pretty easily and exposes a soft, slightly chewy but airy center. The marshmallow seems to have a little flavour to it, but it’s mostly there for texture. I guess the airy, fluffy marshmallow is supposed to help emulate the softness of an ice cream. Personally I would have preferred they opt for the classic approach of throwing in some waffle bits to emulate a cone, but I can see why they went with the marshmallow.
So the grand question here – what’s my verdict? It’s an offering firmly in the novelty category. Maybe this is a flavour others will enjoy more, but the flavour is nothing too fancy to me, and it’s mostly the texture that will sell this flavour. Being that I don’t particularly enjoy marshmallow textures in this format, I can’t say I would get this again. But if they brought this back with both marshmallow and waffle cone bits…that I could get behind.
