Mint chocolate ice cream comes to Bet Shemesh!

Before I get down to business, I want to note that we were promised rain from yesterday afternoon. We actually had pleasant sunshine until about 5 pm, then it became relatively cool. Only at 10 am this morning (Friday) did it actually rain a little. When I was doing national service in the army, I made a bargain with the weather: I didn't mind if it rained all weekend as long as it didn't rain during the week. I remember that the weather actually kept this bargain for quite some time in 1980.

Yesterday evening I had to go to the local mall for a specialist doctor's appointment (maybe more on that later in a separate blog). This gave me the chance to go to the new ice cream emporium that has opened there. There's a branch near where my son lives in Tel Aviv and he has brought us some ice cream in the past: very tasty. It seems that every branch can choose which flavours to sell (obviously this is dependent on the local population) as the flavours that he brought us weren't for sale yesterday.

But the first thing that I saw was mint chocolate ice cream! I should have taken a picture of it yesterday in order to display here, but I will have to suffice with a picture of someone else's ice cream. I asked for a taste, just to ensure that it's the mint flavour that I like and not the local favourites pistachio or spearmint (nana). So I immediately bought a half kilo package, and to be fair, bought half a kilo of vanilla for my wife. They also had limoncello sorbet on display, of which I had a taste: very refreshing. This will be good when the weather gets hotter.

I am slightly surprised about the choice of flavours on sale here; apart from the Moroccans and Russians, Bet Shemesh has a fairly large minority of American religious Jews, and it may be them that are driving the choice of flavours.

But what is the ice cream like? It was much softer than I expected, though this may change the longer the ice cream is in our freezer*. There don't seem to be any chocolate chips: the chocolate seems to be chocolate ice cream mixed with the mint. There is also a synthetic note of something in the aftertaste that is slightly off-putting. But still: mint chocolate in Bet Shemesh! Despite my minor carping, the ice cream is much better than the regular commercial ice cream - and much more expensive: a kilo of regular ice cream costs about 30 NIS, whereas half a kilo of Golda ice cream costs 60 NIS (the ice cream is weighed so the cost depends on the actual weight, i.e. how much the server managed to cram into the container). That's four times as much. I don't think that the ice cream is four times as good, but it is much better.

The raw materials of the ice cream are apparently sourced from Italian manufacturer Guiso.

 

* Indeed it did.