I went by Dairy Queen yesterday and requested only one scoop of ice cream in my large Coke Float. That seemed to confuse the server. You want less ice cream than what we’d give you?
Why yes. I’m hot & thirsty and I consider a Coke Float a beverage.
Ideally, I try to have a can Coke in the car. So I can add my own to the ice cream jammed in the cup.
Dairy Queen and Sonic usually fill the cup with ice cream and maybe five sips of Coke.
Sonic used to sell blended Coke Floats. They called them Frosties and they were my go to order for 30 years. I miss them so much. I make them at home now with a hand mixer. They should be a little thinner than a milkshake.
Ah, Vernor’s. Haven’t thought about it in years. I’ve lived and/or traveled over a lot of the east coast and have seen it in exactly one store, in Virginia, and that was in 1979 or so. Good to know it’s still around.
The OP mentions one scoop in a large drink. Not sure what “large” means these days, but I’ll go with one scoop also, in a 16 oz drink. This too I haven’t had in years, from around that same time. But I can still feel on my tongue the ever-so-slightly crystallized bits around the edges of the ice cream immediately after you plopped it in. And we called them ice cream floats and never named the particular brand of pop we used.
Just one scoop of ice cream, because it’s supposed to melt into the soda in ribbons of creamy deliciousness. But that wouldn’t help if I was thirsty. If I’m thirsty I need a huge glass of water with plenty of ice if you’ve got it.
b) I like to fill the glass with scoops of ice cream, but loosely, with air spaces
c) A 12 oz can of carbonated beverage*, chilled as if for drinking standalone, but it won’t all fit when you first pour it. The foam comes up. Scoop off a layer of foam with your spoon (and EAT it of course). Repeat the pour. Repeat the scoop. Repeat the pour a third time. You should have most of the soda can’s contents inside the glass now!
d) Utilize both a spoon and a soda straw.
e) If you’ve done this correctly, you should end up with dissolved ice cream in your remaining soda at the very bottom, not a lump of soda-less ice cream.
f) And if you did it correctly, the ice cream, back when you had some, should have little crunchy cavities of frozen soda ensconced within the ice cream scooplets.
Yes, root beer is the #1 especially for vanilla ice cream for the ice cream.
But variety is a good thing in life. Cola over vanilla is quite nice. But use some imagination. Black cherry soda over cherry garcia! Oh, what’s that, the only ice cream in the house is chocolate, and root beer over chocolate ice cream just isn’t a good mix? Got any ginger ale (or better yet ginger beer) handy? Pour THAT over chocolate ice cream, it works really well. Dr Pepper over pistachio ice cream is surprisingly good.
Growing up, for me Black Cow was a root beer (or sometimes Coke) float with vanilla ice cream. I see that the term can mean different things in different places. Looking it up, I see that it can mean a root beer float, a Coke float, one of those with chocolate syrup, or vanilla custard blended with root beer (as in parts of Wisconsin.)
I’ve actually never had the chocolate syrup version.
Anyhow, I’m not big on floats, but when I’ve had them, my preference was for a single scoop of (non-soft serve) vanilla ice cream in root beer. I remember back in the 80s introducing them to my cousins at a little cafe in a small farming village in Poland, thinking they’d be disgusted by the idea of dumping a scoop of ice cream into a perfectly good Coke but, hey, it caught on, and next thing I knew, our little pre-teen clan would go down to the cafe a couple times a week and order a glass of coke and a little cup of ice cream and make ourselves a czarna krowa (“black cow.”)
