Sure, why not.
One of the latest food trends on TikTok and Instagram is inspiring people to dip their ice cream not in chocolate or caramel, but rather liquified butter. (And finished with a sprinkling of sea salt.)
“Butter-dipped soft-serve is the new Dubai chocolate,” one social media user proclaimed before sharing his semi-homemade recipe for the viral bright-yellow treat.
“The butter makes like a hard, delicious frozen shell that you can like, crunch into,” another reviewer said after trying the butter-dipped ice cream at Papa d’Amour, Dominique Ansel’s newest bakery in New York City.
“I did not think I would like this as much as I did,” she added.
The idea for a butter-shelled ice cream appears to have originated with Ansel, a pastry chef who rose to fame with his creation of the Cronut in 2013. Ansel and his team at Papa d’Amour introduced their butter-dipped soft-serve this past summer, intending for it to be a limited-time offering. But the treat, which is made with butter from the Normandy region of France, will instead remain available until the end of the year.
“Earlier in the year, he visited the Isigny Ste. Mère butter farm in Normandy, France with his family,” a spokesperson for Ansel told Nexstar. “[…] He learned about how they make the most beautiful high-quality French-style butter there, even meeting the dairy cows on the farm. That inspired him to create the soft-serve, and it’s been a lot of fun having it on the menu!”
But like any food craze, Ansel’s idea has spawned imitations elsewhere. One of the most prominent is sold at Stew Leonard’s, a supermarket chain with locations in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The stores began selling the item after the CEO of the chain, Stew Leonard Jr., was filmed trying a version he made in one of the store’s kitchens in early November.
“This is trending on TikTok,” Leonard said, before declaring a butter-dipped cone to be “sheer enjoyment.”
Dozens of customers later shared their thoughts on the Stew Leonard’s version on social media, with reviews ranging from “so good” to “interesting” to “waxy.”
“The vanilla ice cream itself is banging. The butter part, it’s not bad. It’s just like, it’s greasy,” said another reviewer after sampling the Stew Leonard’s version. “Clearly I’m eating it, so it’s not bad. I just would never order it again.”
Interested in trying a butter-dipped cone for yourself? If you can’t make it to New York City to taste the original (or even the surrounding Tri-State Area for the Stew Leonard’s version), the treat isn’t impossible to replicate at home. Most recipes simply call for butter, a few scoops of vanilla from the freezer — or even a soft-serve cone from your local ice cream shop — and salt.
The one component missing from all of these online recipes, however, is a “surprise” touch only found at Papa d’Amour, at least so far: a little slab of mochi in the bottom of the cone.
Dominique Ansel, though, is likely content that this little detail is still exclusive to the cones sold at his NYC pastry shop.
“When you’ve created something like the Cronut, you see there’s a lot of imitation out there, and [that’s] something I’m familiar with,” Ansel said in a statement shared with Nexstar.