Savoury ice cream has become a popular fad in trendy Western restaurants, but local vendor Liny Hsueh (
Hsueh's "Dr. Ice" brand offers ice cream, "snowflake ice" (shaved ice) and "bubble ice" (thinly shaved ice) made from shrimp, cuttlefish, tuna, seaweed and laver (purple seaweed) combined with fruits, mint, wasabi, peanut and wine.
Salty, pungent seafood does not seem ideally suited to traditionally sweet and soft ice cream, yet Hsueh has managed to find a harmony between the two to create the nation's only seafood-flavored frozen desserts line.
PHOTO: AFP
The combination might even pique the interest of Ferran Adria, Spain's experimental chef famed for his startling combinations of seemingly incongruous ingredients often based on their their similar molecular structure.
Hsueh's ice cream booth sits amongst stalls at an indoor fish market in Bisha port (
She launched Dr. Ice in 2003 and now has two shops in the city better known by their Chinese name "Shia Bing Hsieh Chiang" (蝦冰蟹醬, "shrimp ice crab sauce").
The 13 flavors on offer include pineapple shrimp, wasabi cuttlefish, strawberry tuna and mango seaweed, all in stark colors from orange to green to black.
All are served in white or blue shell on fish-shaped plates and bowls, and some also come with a sprinkle of small dried fish, roe or chopped squid.
"I walked by Shia Bing Hsieh Chiang several months ago and entered out of curiosity. Now I visit the store often with my classmates," 14-year-old student Yvonne Yen said.
"I like the ice cream here, especially the cuttlefish flavor, because of the rich texture and lighter sweet taste. The color [black] is really cool," Yen said.
Peter Lin, a first-time customer who tried shrimp and seaweed flavored ice cream, said he was surprised that it didn't carry the smell or salty taste of seafood.
"I was a little worried that it would taste disgusting and weird," the 41-year-old said.
Hsueh's family initially expressed similar skepticism when she announced she was going to make "snowflakes ice" from shrimp.
"They thought I was crazy because shrimp seemed an impossible ingredient for frozen desserts," the spirited Hsueh, 45, said.
"I had to find a niche in the crowded market of ice desserts and I thought that even though Taiwan is an island with abundant oceanic resources, seafood was never used to make them and I wanted to give it a try," she said.
Hsueh was also encouraged by an old Taiwanese saying which goes: "The number one job is selling ice desserts and the number two is being a doctor."
More inviting still was the dessert market, estimated by industry watchers at over NT$10 billion (US$298.8 million) a year.
The novelty proved an initial success, with Hsueh greeting the patrons at her small store and making up to NT$700,000 a month during summer.
In less than a year she opened her second branch shop in Taipei's bustling Tung Hua Street night market, popular with locals and foreign tourists, but it flopped and closed after six months.
Hsueh decided to focus her efforts in Keelung and opened a booth in Bisha fish market last December, developing a new line of seafood sausage, dumpling and meat balls to make up for the slow winter season.
Now, she is ready to expand again and this time is targeting the sunny southern part of the country, where ice desserts business has an average ten-month sales season compared with five in the north.
A Keelung high school on Saturday night apologized for using a picture containing a Chinese flag on the cover of the senior yearbook, adding that it has recalled the books and pledged to provide students new ones before graduation on Thursday. Of 309 Affiliated Keelung Maritime Senior High School of National Taiwan Ocean University graduates, 248 had purchased the yearbook. Some students said that the printer committed an outrageous error in including the picture, while others said that nobody would notice such a small flag on the cover. Other students said that they cared more about the photographs of classmates and what was
GOING INTERNATIONAL: Rakuten Girls squad leader Ula Shen said she was surprised that baseball fans outside of Taiwan not only knew of them, but also knew their names Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Oakland Athletics on Saturday hosted its first Taiwanese Heritage Day event at the Oakland Coliseum with a performance by Taiwanese cheerleading squad the Rakuten Girls and a video message from Vice President William Lai (賴清德). The Rakuten Girls, who are the cheerleaders for the CPBL’s Rakuten Monkeys, performed in front of a crowd of more than 2,000 people, followed by a prerecorded address by Lai about Taiwan’s baseball culture and democratic spirit. Taiwanese pitcher Sha Tzu-chen (沙子宸), who was signed by the Athletics earlier this year, was also present. Mizuki Lin (林襄), considered a “baseball cheerleading goddess” by Taiwanese
WAY OF THE RUKAI: ‘Values deemed worthy often exist amid discomfort, so when people go against the flow, nature becomes entwined with our lives,’ a student said “Run, don’t walk” after your dreams, Nvidia cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told National Taiwan University (NTU) graduates yesterday, as several major universities held in-person graduation ceremonies for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. “What will you create? Whatever it is, run after it. Run, don’t walk. Remember, either you’re running for food, or you are running from becoming food. Oftentimes, you can’t tell which. Either way, run,” he said. Huang was one of several tech executives addressing graduating students at Taiwanese universities. National Chengchi University held two ceremonies, with alumnus Patrick Pan (潘先國), who is head of Taiwan
A 14-legged giant isopod is the highlight of a new dish at a ramen restaurant in Taipei and it has people lining up — both for pictures and for a bite from this bowl of noodles. Since “The Ramen Boy” launched the limited-edition noodle bowl on Monday last week, declaring in a social media post that it had “finally got this dream ingredient,” more than 100 people have joined a waiting list to dine at the restaurant. “It is so attractive because of its appearance — it looks very cute,” said the 37-year-old owner of the restaurant, who wanted to be
RSS