I finally got around to getting myself some deep fried ice cream from Belgian Fries on Commercial Drive (incidentally, the chain has a completely useless website if you're looking for, say, their current menu). The last time I had it was over 20 years ago, and I'd been looking for it for a while. Apparently in all the wrong places because my companion last Saturday said it was commonplace with Mexican restaurants.
Anyway, there it was, deep fried pecan ice cream. It was a largish lump of ice cream, roughly earth-shaped and about the size of an orange. It was coated in what appeared to be cornflakes, deep friend, then striped with some red sauce, possibly a strawberry syrup or the like.
When I had it way back when -- and I was just a kid then, so my perceptions might have become rose-coloured with nostalgia since -- it was much smaller, almost bite-sized, and the warm exterior was nicely contrasted with the soft, cool interior.
What I had on Saturday was probably best described as ice cream with soggy cornflakes on the side.
The crust was indeed deep fried and crispy, at least at the start. But the cold ice cream core soon rendered it wet and yucky, tasty sauce notwithstanding.
The interior was a large lump of icecream (about, say, 1/8th of a 1.65L small tub of President's Choice "Loads of Ice Cream", on sale this week for $5.00 if you missed their under-$5 Breyer's ice cream sale last week). Though for $5.25, it really could have been larger -- or they could have charged less.
And the deep frying did nothing to soften it, so it was exactly like eating a big scoop of ice cream.
Obviously, if they'd fried it longer, the outer part of the ice cream scoop would have melted into some gross vanilla milk thing while the deeper core remained hard.
The point is, deep fried ice cream, as presented by Belgian Fries, is a complete waste of time. For $5.25, you had an overpriced scoop of ice cream and cornflakes which you may or may not want after it got wet.
If they had used a softer Italian style gelato ice cream, maybe you could have had a sample of the mixed temperature and texture of crust and ice cream. They'd probably need to make it in multiple smaller portions (bite-sized, perhaps, to fit one whole ball in your mouth in one go).
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