This dessert is totally claw-some … if you’re brave enough to try it.
With crawfish season in full-swing, one Texas ice cream shop continues to capitalize on the Southern staple — churning out their signature crawfish ice cream scoop, topped with an entire crustacean.
Red Circle Ice Cream in Houston, Texas, has been a staple in the community since August 2017, boasting delicious flavors of handcrafted ice cream, but that wacky flavor is, surprisingly, the most popular of them all.
The shell-shocking ice cream is flavored with a mix of Cajun seasoning, butter and garlic, and topped with an entire crawfish.
The cray-zy scoop has become a fan favorite at the store since it was first unveiled in 2019 — with customers calling up owner Nickey Ngo as early as January asking when it will be back in store.
“I can’t even explain how popular it is,” Ngo told the CBC’s As It Happens. “If I didn’t have the demand for it … then I wouldn’t be making it. I wouldn’t be that crazy.”
Crawfish season in the Lone Star State typically begins in late January and lasts through July — but Ngo only starts serving up her signature flavor in the spring, when the little shellfish are at peak freshness.
The bizarre-but-beloved crawfish scoop was first inspired at a 2019 Ngo family summer seafood boil.
“I’m eating and the juices are flowing, and I’m licking my fingers and I’m just [like], ‘Mmm, it’s so good.’ My sister’s sitting next to me, and she’s, like, ‘You should make this into a crawfish ice cream,’” Ngo said.
Ngo said a “lightbulb went off,” and she raced into her test kitchen the next day to bring the daring flavor to life.
In one shot, the crawfish ice cream flavor was born.
The key, Ngo said, to a perfect balance of sweet and savory in every bite — one that doesn’t “sit on your tongue kind of weird” — is “lots and lots of butter.”
The ice cream base of seasoning, butter and garlic is cooked with live crawfish to draw out the down-South flavor, but Ngo said there is no actual crawfish in the ice cream itself.
“Nobody wants to eat a frozen crawfish tail, let’s be honest. So we thought a more creative way would be to top it off with a fresh crawfish,” she said.
To those daring enough to try the crazy concoction, Ngo recommends eating the crawfish meat first … so you can use the crustacean shell as a spoon.
“There’s no rules, obviously. But we recommend you use the crawfish body itself, the actual head or the tail, and you scoop it up and you eat it with the actual crawfish, and that is your spoon,” Ngo said.
Since its debut, new and long-term customers alike rave about the flavor profile of the crawfish scoop — despite its absurdity — embracing the unexpected mix of sweet and seafood.
Customer Ali Muhammad said the seafood treat is “really good” and worth giving a go.
“It’s different. It’s, like, not your typical ice cream, for sure,” he said. “But, I mean, it’s really worth a try.”
First-time customer Lauren Moore was also a fan of the crawfish-infused scoop and said, “It’s, like, a little salty, but it’s like creamy, smooth. A little spicy.”
Ngo says she plans to keep churning out the crawfish ice cream for as long as she can.
“We have sold out multiple times already,” she said.
