Persicco!

Last night, our friends Maxi and Delfin came over for dinner, and they brought with them ONE KILO of delicious Persicco ice cream. (They didn't actually bring it with them, but they ordered it when they got here and the Persicco delivery boy dropped it off about an hour later and when they paid, he gave them 23 pesos change in coins -- that is pretty amazing in a city that is notoriously short of change.)

In my opinion, Persicco has the BEST ice cream in the city. Unfortunately, it also has the highest prices, so I only eat it on special occasions. (I have a broad definition of what constitutes a special occasion.) We ordered four flavours: bitter chocolate, chocoquina, dulce de leche and orange/peach. It also came with a side sample of flan.

The bitter chocolate flavour is one of the best. It really is a bitter chocolate, not sweet at all and very creamy. It has the same consistency as chocolate crinkle cookie dough.

Chocoquina is an Argentine invention. It's some sort of caramelly, flanny, eggy flavour with chunks of chocolate cookies. I believe it was inspired by the traditional Argentine birthday cake by the same name. The cake consists of several alternating layers of chocolate cookies, chocolate cake and caramel sauce, all slathered with choclate icing (every dentist and cardiologist's dream). I do my best to avoid chocoquina cake wherever possible. The ice cream, however, was better than I expected. Its creamy consistency and Kahlua colour were appealing, but the chocolate cookie chunks were soggy.

Dulce de leche is caramel. It is cloyingly sweet and can usually be found in medialunas (croissants), cookies, cakes, ice creams, pastries, chocuquina, coffee, cereal, yogurts, fruit, etc etc. It comes in huge tubs and is also eaten on its own. I once bought a little tub of dulce de leche and we ate the whole thing in a week, and I haven't bought any since. Jacob won't let me. Anyways, we ordered dulce de leche ice cream. It's better as ice cream than as caramel spread because it's less gooey, and it goes well with bitter chocolate. Persicco also has dulce de leche with nuts, chocolate chips, brownie bits, and pure caramel, but we had the plain one.

The fourth flavour was orange/peach. I really like this flavour. It's a sherbert, and I think it's on their low-fat list. It's not as creamy as the other ones because it's water-based, but the flavours are strong and the colour is bright orange. It's refreshing. Not as good as my favourite seasonal flavour, which is watermelon sherbert (sandia), but it's a good second choice.

The flan sampler was perfect only in that I now know to never order that flavour.

The ice cream came in two environmentally unfriendly, teardrop-shaped styrofoam containers. They keep it cold by putting dry ice inside (on a piece of wax paper). I usually drop the dry ice in the sink in the sink and watch the steam come off it as it melts. We're going to have to find a way of serving ice cream in better containers. I don't think the styrofoam would work at home.

Anyways, here are some pictures of us enjoying our ice cream.

ps I finished off half a kilo of leftovers as I wrote this blog entry.