Open Post: Hosted By Guinea Pig Ice Cream
A friend of mine’s favorite ice cream treat is black raspberry ice cream with gummi bears. That was the ice cream concoction that I would have considered to be the most unholy until HuffPo introduced us to the hot new ice cream trend out of Ecuador – guinea pig ice cream.
In case you didn’t know, guinea pigs aren’t just those odd little pets burrowing into wood shavings in ratty cages in your first-grade classrooms. They’re a traditional food in Latina America. Although, they’re usually served hot.
The rodents are a traditional hot dish in some Latin American countries, including Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. In Ecuador, people typically cook guinea pigs with salt and serve them with potatoes and peanut sauce.
But now they’re trendy cold.
“I was suspicious, but it was tasty,” said Marlene Franco, a 78-year-old retiree who tried a scoop at a stall next to a highway linking the Ecuadorian capital of Quito to the city of Sangolqui.
No, guinea pig ice cream is not made by milking guinea pigs. The ice cream is made by cooking and preparing a pate from the animal’s flesh, adding milk or cream and then refrigerating it until it has “the rough consistency of ice cream.” It reportedly tastes like chicken. It looks like this, by the way:
Guinea pig ice cream proves popular for a Bolivian entrepreneur https://t.co/llJ0H3fkax pic.twitter.com/eSfLORkr8L
— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 5, 2019
Oh, and if you’re not feeling the rodents, there’s always the bugs. The proprietor, María del Carmen Pilapaña, is making a killing making desserts out of bugs too:
She also makes 40 servings of ice cream flavored with beetles, also traditionally eaten as a salty snack, and a smaller amount of mushroom ice cream.
“My family and my husband thought I was crazy. They didn’t think anyone would like these ice creams, but now they’re our main product,” said Pilapaña, who acknowledges that she had her own doubts about whether her investment would pay off.
If guinea pig ice cream tastes like chicken, then all you gotta do is add two buns, a scoop each of French’s mustard ice cream and ketchup ice cream, and you’ve got yourself a chicken-tasting ice cream sandwich. Oh shit, I think I just gave Baskin-Robbins an idea on how to enter the never-ending Chicken Sandwich Wars of 2019.
Pic: Wikipedia Commons