New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area Central Markets: Bubbies Mochi Ice Cream

by Teresa Gubbins

Bubbies mochi ice cream from Hawaii

Bubbies Mochi Ice Cream comes from Bubbies, a Honolulu-based company whose mochi ice cream is shipped to stores and restaurants around the world. That now includes Central Market stores, where a box of 9 pieces sells for $7.99.

Up until this year, the only places in Dallas you could get Bubbies Mochi Ice Cream were two restaurants: Nobu and SushiSamba, both of whom make it a point, corporate-wise, to have it on the menus at all of their locations. With Sushi Samba closed, that leaves Nobu, and now C.M.

Like bubble tea, mochi ice cream is not something everyone will love. It's a major textural experience. You have to appreciate chewy things, since the rice-based wrapper is chewy. (You can find blocks of mochi, no ice cream, at Whole Foods, in the refrigerator case near the milk; you break it into pieces and toast it for an ultra-chewy breakfast.)

If you do like chewy, the combination of the mochi with the ice cream center is irresistible. You bite through the chewy shell and the ice cream melts in your mouth, for an effect that's sort of juicy and slurpy.

Many flavors of mochi ice cream

Lots of Asian markets stock mochi ice cream, but Bubbies is unique in that it has 1. good-quality ice cream (Bubbies started as a straight-ahead ice cream place before branching out into the mochi line) and 2. a huge selection of flavors: from Asian-centric flavors such as green tea to more generic flavors such as vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and coffee. The flavors are all good. One day, I got stuck getting blueberry because that's pretty much all they had and, while I like blueberry, I really like the green tea which they were out of, and was thus disappointed; but the blueberry was just as good. Really blueberry-ish. They also have more exotic flavors like lychee and azuki bean, and seasonal flavors such as pumpkin.