Last summer I was invited by WBEZ to join an on-air panel discussing summer treats. Sun-Times reporter Ambar Colón talked about her just-published roundup — still an excellent resource — of the most noteworthy artisanal shops around town.
“Where do you go to get ice cream?” the host, Sasha-Ann Simons, asked me. Urgh. I couldn’t think fast enough to admit the truth with any style, so I giggled out “McDonald’s” and launched into an incoherent riff on fast food soft serve. Not great.
But I really do love soft serve, and in the full realm of today’s swirled possibilities — dipped in chocolate, dipped in butter, flavored with taro, or even reimagined as a reuben (?!) — there is one particular soft serve object I value above all: a plain vanilla wafer cone, the kind with a paper sleeve stuck on it with some sort of hopefully food-safe adhesive. When I say my ice cream doesn’t have to be fancy, trust me.
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Admitting you’re into vanilla soft serve cones from fast food restaurants sounds perilously close to “You know what’s good? Soup, that’s what.” But even the most plain treats can excite obsession. A great vanilla soft serve first and foremost melts right. It drips, but only a little. Your tongue should patrol the circumference of the cone for errant rivulets but needn’t overexert itself. Your lips and teeth also need to work, but I won’t go into further description because it will sound gross.
Let me instead surmise the texture needs to be two things at once — something to lick, and something to bite. What creates the right texture? Organic Jersey cow milk? No, emulsifiers and stabilizers. Mono- and diglycerides. Guar gum and carrageenan. The very ingredients left out of artisanal matcha soft serve and the reason the latter can seem so stiff and unfriendly.
As for flavor, well, I’ve admitted my tastes are vanilla. Honestly, the best soft serves are the ones that are least like vanilla or, rather, synthesized vanillin, which is so one note. All I ask is that they remind me (however faintly) of real dairy.
Cheap wafer cones are key: If you tongue-push the ice cream into the cone as you eat, then you fill all those cells in the wafer structure in the base of the cone, and that creates a few blissful final bites, a honeycomb filled with ice cream. Don’t worry about the sticky dot of adhesive that had attached the paper sleeve. I looked it up: it’s usually corn syrup.
I gave myself permission to eat many soft serves in preparation for this article. The biggest disappointment was the version served at the Small Cheval that had engulfed (R.I.P.) The Freeze. It melted far too quickly into its plastic cone holder which backed up like a Chicago gutter in a rainstorm. These three, however, more or less pass the test:
Chick-fil-A: Before any mention of the ice cream — sorry, Icedream — I should mention that I get this cone often enough that I downloaded the app so I can go through the mobile preorder drive thru. Once, Bucktown manager Josh Faretta sent me a free ice cream cone as one of his periodic gifts to app customers, and I got so excited pulling up the QR code to redeem it in the drive thru that I smashed my fender into a pole. Everyone turned to look and continued looking during the drive of shame as I inched my way toward the service window. The repairs cost $245 minus the $2.09 profit from the free cone. The F.D.A. doesn’t allow CFA to call their product ice cream because it doesn’t contain enough milk fat. So it must bear the moniker “frozen dairy dessert,” rechristened as Icedream. No matter. It is milky nonetheless, airy, quick to go down, and a bit icy. The texture isn’t impeccably homogenized like others, which somehow makes it seem more natural. At 180 calories, it’s half of one of those gym protein shakes that taste like spirulina and virtue.
Dairy Queen: Have you ever noticed that DQ soft serve doesn’t really melt? It kind of slumps in full sun and lists to the side if you don’t eat it fast enough, but I’ve rarely seen an actual drip. That may be because the company uses an emulsifier called polysorbate 80. (In exceptionally large doses it may thin the lining of your stomach, apparently.) At least the texture is engaging. When you sink your teeth into DQ soft serve, their outline leaves an impression, so eating a cone here is all about taking a bite then effacing the teeth marks with your tongue. I’m not in love with the flavor that hints at vanilla and milk but tastes mostly of sugar and industrial manipulation. Oftentimes here I go to the dark (or at least swirled) side and ask for chocolate just for a bit of kick.
McDonald’s: There’s no chocolate option here, and no need. The vanilla is perfect. If I were to compare the flavor to anything, it’s the fior di latte gelato you get in Italy — the kind that revels in the pure flavor of sweetened cream. It melts so precisely, always threatening a mess but never delivering one. You have to pay attention to this cone but also remind yourself not to go too fast, to savor this ephemeral treat undergoing a phase change from solid to liquid for you, only you, right now, in your hand.
So, yes, esteemed WBEZ food panel, my favorite place to get ice cream is McDonald’s.
John Kessler is a freelance dining critic and columnist for Chicago magazine.