Délicha

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream is finally available in Montreal! Most of us had our first experience with liquid nitrogen in our high school years - the fun of freezing objects then shattered them on the floor. Ah the good ol' days... You can relive your high school years with this new ice cream shop, located next to Place-d'Armes metro station. So... what's so special about liquid nitrogen ice cream? It is the easiest way to make ice cream in less than 5 minutes. The consistency of the ice cream depends on the size of the ice crystals. When liquid nitrogen rapidly cools a creamy substance, the fat and the water molecules remains very small, creating a smooth texture to the ice cream - much smoother than store-bought or churned ice cream.

I made liquid nitrogen ice cream in 2010 with a group of food bloggers. You can find the recipe and video on my blog Random Cuisine: http://www.randomcuisine.com/2010/04/making-ice-cream-with-liquid-nitrogen.html

Délicha lets you create your own ice cream from a wide selection of creamy base, flavours and toppings. The basic ice cream (Cream + 1 Flavour) costs $5.00. It offers three possible creamy base - 18% Cream, Frozen Yoghurt or Soy Milk. You then choose from a list of flavours like vanilla, matcha green tea, black sesame, fruits, etc... Any additional flavour and toppings cost $0.75. You can decide to have your ice cream on a waffle for a $1 extra. Once the selection is made, you can now see all the liquid nitrogen actions prepared in front of you. The ice cream will be done in less than 5 minutes.

All of our ice cream was smooth and well-made. Some of the ice cream was lacking of flavours like the honey, pistachio and chocolate. The chocolate is mostly cocoa powder which gives a bitter taste to the ice cream. It was a bit unappetizing. The staffs were nice enough to remake the ice cream to cut down its bitterness.

Some of the ice cream was also lacking of sweetness. Do not hesitate to ask the staffs to add more sugar. They will gladly do it. Considering that ice cream tends to numb the sensitivity of our taste buds, more sugar are usually added to compensate the reduced sensitivity. You can try testing on cold vs. melted ice cream.

There are definitely some positives. I had the black sesame ice cream with a waffle bowl. The black sesame has a nutty taste uniformly distributed throughout the ice cream. The flavours of the fruity ice cream are quite prominent. Finally, we might have discovered an interesting flavour combination - cream cheese and maple syrup. So delicious!

Seeing Délicha is still in its infant stage, there are some tweaking to do in order to achieve the right balance of flavour and sweetness. Making ice cream with liquid nitrogen is definitely appealing for the young demographics.