Crawfish ice cream has become this Texas shop's No. 1 menu item

Every jan, at the take up of crawfish flavor, samuel houston water ice cream shop owner Nickey Ngo's phone starts ringing off the hook.

The customers, she says, have one question: When will Red Circle Ice Cream's signature crawfish ice cream be back on the menu?

The ice cream — flavoured with a mix of Cajun seasoning, butter and garlic then topped with an entire crustacean — may sound like a novelty food trend. But in the seven years Ngo has been serving it up, she says, it's become a staple of her business. 

"I can't even explain how popular it is," Ngo told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "If I didn't have the demand for it … then I wouldn't be making it. I wouldn't be that crazy."

It all started at a Ngo family summer crawfish boil in 2019.

"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.

"Ding, ding, ding, ding! Light bulb went off. I go into my test kitchen literally the next morning and in one shot, I created this ice cream flavour, and crawfish ice cream was born."

Texas shop serves up crawfish ice cream

The ice cream base is flavoured with a mix of seasonings, garlic and butter, then cooked with live crawfish to draw out the flavour.

There's no actual crawfish meat 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.

"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."

The key to the dish's longevity, she says, is the perfect balance of sweet and savoury.

She didn't want to create a flavour that "sits on your tongue kind of weird."

"So I was like, how do you make it creamy at the same time?" she said. "So we added butter. Lots and lots of butter."

Customer Lauren Moore, trying it for the first time, says the flavour profile works.

"It's like, a little salty, but it’s like, creamy, smooth," she said. "A little spicy.”

Customer Ali Muhammad called it "really good."

“It’s different. It’s, like, not your typical ice cream, for sure," he said. "But, I mean, it’s really worth a try."

Crawfish season in Texas typically starts in late January and lasts through July, but the little shellfish are at peak freshness in the spring, which is when Ngo starts serving up her signature dish.

She plans to keep it on the menu as long as she can.

"We have sold out multiple times already," she said. 

Interview produced by Chris Harbord

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