Ciripella: Lake Balaton ice cream shop offers crunchy ice cream flavoured with crickets
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Attila Pálfi, the creative pastry chef of the Vitorlás ice cream shop in Balatonmáriafürdő, has come up with another eye-catching ice cream speciality. Under the name Ciripella, he has created an ice cream flavoured with crickets. The new flavour is a caramel, chocolate, and hazelnut-based dessert, made truly unique by a crunchy cricket topping.
According to the local news outlet sonline.hu, the idea came to Mr Pálfi during a night swim last summer. “I wanted to create something special connected to Lake Balaton,” he said. As there were many mosquitoes, he initially considered making a mosquito-flavoured ice cream. However, only four insect species are approved for human consumption in the European Union, and mosquitoes are not among them. Therefore, he turned to crickets instead.
Ciripella – The chocolate sings, the cricket crunches
Cricket-flavoured ice cream is not entirely new in Europe. In Germany, a new type of ice cream has been made using insect flour. However, a version served with whole crickets is uniquely Hungarian and available exclusively at the Vitorlás ice cream shop at Lake Balaton.
The base of Ciripella is a caramel, chocolate, and hazelnut Gianduja ice cream, sprinkled with salted, caramelised crickets upon the guest’s request, in place of sugar. The pastry chef orders the insects from the Czech Republic and says their taste most closely resembles sunflower seeds.
