The World’s Most Expensive Ice Cream Will Set You Back Over $6,000
What’s in Cellato’s Byakuya, anyway?
Guinness World Records
I scream, you scream. We’ll probably all scream when we learn the price of Japanese ice cream brand Cellato’s record-breaking ice cream. A modest serving of the brand’s frozen treat Byakuya will set you back 873,400 Japanese yen, which was about $6,696 when it collected the Guinness World Record for the World’s Most Expensive Ice Cream last week. (Note: It does come with a fancy ice cream spoon!)
Cellato, which says it sells “Gelato that delights even your cells,” makes its record-breaking ice cream with white truffle, sake lees and parmigiano cheese.
According to Cellato’s product description, the “rich and mellow” gelato includes “plenty of Italy’s ‘Phantom White Truffle,’” which are known as “white diamonds” and provides “a sensual and unique scent.” It also features “two types of cheese as a base” and traditional Japanese sake lees.
“The faint sweetness and gorgeous ginjo incense give the scent of white truffles a complex flavor. To finish, white truffles and parmigiano cheese that look like snow are luxuriously placed and decorated with gold leaf,” the brand notes.
The ice cream comes with extra white truffle oil to give it “a more luxurious scent” and also a metal spoon handmade by Takeuchi craftsmen in Fushimi, Kyoto, using the “techniques and materials used in the construction of temples and shrines.” Ice cream purchasers receive the spoon in one of two different patterns.
Guinness World Records
The full list of ingredients includes “milk, natural cheese, sugar, dairy products, egg yolk, milk-based foods, white truffle, rice, rice malt, cashew nuts, starch syrup, salt, black truffle, brewed alcohol, gold leaf/trehalose, milk Protein, stabilizer (thickening polysaccharide), emulsifier (contains some milk components and eggs).”
And serving instructions suggest pouring the white truffle oil on the ice cream and mixing “until it is soft enough to allow a spoon to go into it.” It also pairs well with sake, according to the ice cream maker.
Guinness World Record notes that Cellato brought in Osaka-based fusion-cuisine chef Tadayoshi Yamada to “fuse together European and Japanese ingredients in the form of ice cream.”
Although the Guinness Team was unable to sample the ice cream on which it bestowed the record, it says the Cellato staff who did taste it described it as “rich in taste and texture,” with a “robust fragrance of white truffle” that “fills your mouth and nose, followed by complex and fruity tastes of Parmigiano Reggiano” and finished with the flavor of sake lees.
“It took us over 1.5 years to develop, with a lot of trials and errors to get the taste right,” a Cellato representative tells Guinness. “Achieving a Guinness World Records title made the effort all worth it.”
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