How to cook blue raspberry ice cream

 Blue raspberry is a very difficult flavor to define. When trying to describe it, the first thing that comes to mind is that it's an attractive color (although it's definitely not found in nature) that looks a bit like windshield washer fluid, although it's much tastier. As for that flavor, blue raspberries don't actually taste like raspberries, they don't even taste like raspberries. So what should blue raspberries taste like? Blueberry?No. You die? Neither that nor. Maybe a strange hybrid species like “wildberry” or “razzleberry”? Closer perhaps.

Surprisingly, there is an actual fruit that the blue raspberry scent is supposed to mimic (as opposed to blue strawberries, which are nothing). According to Spoon University, there is a fruit called the white-skinned raspberry (Rubus leucodermis, if you have a preference for the genus and species). Interestingly, the berry is neither blue nor white. In fact, it's more of a purple color. But its slightly more tart flavor than raspberry was chosen to incorporate the electric blue color that, in this case of the
, predates the flavor for which it is so known.

How the blue raspberry came about
ICE 
It all started with ICEE.ICEEs, that frozen treat that (like so many of our favorite foods) was invented accidentally in the 1950s, used to only come in cherry flavor. In 1970, a marketing genius thought: Let's do one in blue. Instead of blueberry, they chose a raspberry flavor and colored it with Blue No. food coloring. 1. This made a nice, even patriotic contrast to the cherry ICEE, which was obviously red.




There was a time when popsicle companies like Fla-Vor-Ice and Otter Pops offered a variety of flavors like cherry, strawberry, watermelon, and raspberry, but it was a pretty monochromatic popsicle: red, red, red , Red. Of course, slightly different shades of red so that people can distinguish the flavors, but there is still a lot of red food coloring.

Popcorn belly with butter
In 1976, however, the Food and Drug Administration revealed that consuming Red No. 2, the deep red hue most commonly used to flavor raspberries, was actually very dangerous (as were many other food colorings, according to later findings). ).Manufacturers looking for a safer alternative turned to the Blue No. 1 that worked so well at ICEEs and decided: why not use it to make our new raspberry? However, over time, they decided that such a distinctive color deserved its own flavor variant, and somehow the dark white raspberry peel was chosen as the flavoring agent behind this enduring mystery of a food flavor that now comes in tons. . of various products, from 7-Eleven Slurpees to lollipops to Pop-Tarts.

Now you know: The most popular tongue-staining fruit flavor isn't as wrong as we thought.