#22 soft serve summer (July Series #6)
July 2020. Notes on Sado Island's soft serves.
Dear friends, welcome to part 6 of the July letters. If you’re new here, I’m Flory Leow, and this newsletter is usually sent on a monthly basis. This month, you’ll receive them twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays. Read the archives here; if my writing brightens up your day or makes you think, you should share this indiscriminately with lots of people.
Japan lacks the abundance of great ice cream or gelato shops that, say, Italy has; in general, the ice cream game is not especially strong. (When the gelato is good, scoops are expensive and meted out rather parsimoniously.) But the country’s soft serve game is second to none. Anyone who has ever driven through the country will have stopped at a road station, and there is usually a soft serve flavour or several local to the area. Cherry in parts of Yamagata, for instance. Mikan in Ehime. Lemon in Hiroshima. So on, so forth. For something more easily accessible nationwide, Cremia is one of the more famous ‘premium’ brands around; their soft serves are worth trying primarily for the brilliant, buttery langue du chat cone. Why no other company has emulated this on a large scale is a mystery.
Though I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, my soft serve consumption has shot up dramatically since I began cycling. There are few more delicious ways to jack up your blood sugar back to functioning levels on a gruelling cycle than ice cream. The Shimanami Kaido is a perfect example of such: if you zip through all 80km in a day (as a few friends and I did back in March, twice in a row) you will want all the ice cream you can eat in between stretches of pedalling. Perhaps the most memorable soft serve stop––out of several––was a salt-and-chocolate soft serve on Hakatajima, slurped mid-afternoon as we gawked at a particularly shiny pink-purple S-Works racing bike belonging to a moustached gent in his fifties.
I am hardly an authority on the nation’s soft serves, but can proclaim with some certainty that what you find on Sado Island (Niigata prefecture) is pretty good. There is a certain dearth of ice cream in certain parts of the island––in fact, you had best stock up on snacks if you are circumnavigating at least part of it on two wheels––but there are gems to be found here and there.
There’s Shimafumi, a little coastal cafe perched on a cliff on the southwest side of Sado; their milk soft serve arrives tall and luscious in a crunchy waffle cone. Then there’s the stand outside Toki Forest Park, with their delicious edamame soft serve. Reminiscent of zunda, a Sendai specialty of sweetened mashed edamame beans, it’s proof that edamame needn’t always be salty. In summer there’s also nectarine soft serve, gently sour and not too sweet (the greatest compliment you will ever hear in Asia re: dessert). Though Sado is a bit of a trek from Tokyo––it’s not somewhere you go on a whim––I’d like to return to this stand during other seasons for the possibility of strawberry, mikan, and yuzu soft serves.
One of the best soft serves on the island might be at Osaka-ya near Ryotsu Port, a retro little cake shop in a mostly ossified shotengai. The old man there hands you one out of a large, cylindrical contraption in the shop window. The cone is of the dry, styrofoam variety but it almost doesn’t matter because the soft serve itself is everything you could ask for from summer. It is vanilla-fragrant, rich and creamy but not cloying. It is objectively delicious, and made even better by having just pedalled 90km around the northern side of the island on a scorching day.
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LONG READS, GOOD THINGS
You Have The Right To Remain Silent (Paris Review)
Life in Hong Kong Has Always Been Impossible (New York Times)
Breaking Into The Spell (Guernica)
The Last of Its Kind (The Atlantic)
Going Quiet as the World Goes Loud: On Private Anxiety in a Very Public Pandemic (LitHub)
Coventry (Granta)
MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC
Yo Yo Ma - Bach Six Cello Suites - BBC Proms 2015: We do not deserve Yo Yo Ma, but here he is.
Gold Motel – Summer House: Everything by Gold Motel is perfect summer music and there are few things that wake me up better in the morning.