Japanese ice cream maker Cellato is taking gastronomic luxury to new heights with an ice cream that costs $6696 (873,400 Japanese yen) per scoop. It’s so extravagant, in fact, that it just clinched the Guinness World Record for most expensive ice cream.
For that price, you might expect the dessert to contain literal gold—and it does. But the decorative gold-leaf shavings aren’t the main reason one scoop could empty a bank account. As the New York Post reports, the ice cream is also made with a very rare white truffle from Alba, Italy; one kilogram costs more than $15,000. Other ingredients include sake lees—a tangy paste created during sake production—and Parmigiano Reggiano. Cellato enlisted RiVi head chef Tadayoshi Yamada to come up with the recipe, which was intended as a blend of European and Japanese culinary influences. It’s called byakuya, Japanese for “white night,” per CNN.
A Cellato spokesperson told Guinness World Records that the dish took longer than a year and a half to perfect, “with a lot of trials and errors to get the taste right.” In other words, it probably tastes even better than it looks. And when it comes to weird ice cream flavors, hard cheese and truffle probably doesn’t even crack the top 10. Caviar, on the other hand—which is apparently one of the ingredients that Cellato’s ice cream masterminds are planning to experiment with next—just might.
Though byakuya is in the world record books for most expensive ice cream, it’s still thousands of dollars cheaper than the world’s most expensive dessert: That claim to fame is currently held by Serendipity 3’s Frrrozen Haute Chocolate ice cream sundae, a $25,000 pile of sugary goodness made with some of the world’s most luxurious kinds of cocoa. To be fair, though, the price tag also includes a diamond-encrusted gold spoon (among other things).
This article was originally published on www.mentalfloss.com as One Scoop of the World’s Most Expensive Ice Cream Will Set You Back Nearly $7000.
