Always wanted to know what makes a good spaghetti ice cream and which recipe you need? And who actually invented this classic sundae? Here's everything you need to know.
Spaghettieis – spaghetti ice cream – is Germany's favourite sundae: vanilla ice cream pressed into noodles, topped with strawberry "tomato sauce" and white chocolate "parmesan". Outside Germany hardly anyone knows it, and plenty of visitors are surprised to find spaghetti on an ice cream menu.
The story of the popular sundae
In other countries spaghetti ice cream isn't nearly as popular, and some people are still surprised to spot spaghetti on an ice cream parlour's menu. One reason it's such a hit in Germany is surely that it was invented here. Who exactly invented it isn't entirely clear. But one thing's for sure: its Italian inspiration. Two Italians living in Germany each claim to have invented spaghetti ice cream around 1969: Eliano Rizzardini, who ran an ice cream café in Neuss, and Dario Fontanella, an ice cream maker in Mannheim. Neither of them patented the idea – perhaps lucky for us, because who knows whether spaghetti ice cream would otherwise have spread so far. Today it's the most popular sundae in Germany.
Born on the ski slope or in a pizzeria
Dario Fontanella tells how the dessert "Mont Blanc" inspired him to invent spaghetti ice cream. He ate it at a ski race in Italy and was so blown away that he asked the cook how she made it. She explained that for "Mont Blanc" she pressed chestnut purée through a spätzle press. Dario wanted to try that straight away in his parents' ice cream café in Mannheim – only with ice cream.
The first attempts were all a fail, because only a saucy mush came out of the press. Then Dario had a cool flash of inspiration: the press had to be frozen too, so it wouldn't melt the ice cream. With a frozen spätzle press it worked much better. Spaghetti ice cream almost wasn't vanilla-coloured at all, but green, white and red – at first Dario used pistachio, lemon and strawberry to echo the Italian flag. But his father complained that he'd never seen coloured noodles. Fancy pea or lentil pasta, which you now find in every self-respecting organic supermarket in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, Cologne's Ehrenfeld or Munich's Gärtnerplatz, hadn't been invented back then. Following his father's advice, Dario switched to vanilla ice cream, which looked like spaghetti. And spaghetti ice cream was born – according to the Fontanella myth.
Eliano Rizzardini, on the other hand, describes the invention as a late-night idea that came to him in a friend's pizzeria. Legend has it they wanted to shape ice cream into noodles and used a potato ricer. The ice cream came out of the ricer like spaghetti, and spaghetti ice cream was invented. Which of the two stories is true, we don't know – maybe both.
What goes into a spaghetti ice cream recipe?
Want to make spaghetti ice cream yourself? So what else goes into Germany's favourite ice cream besides the unmistakable shape? For the best spaghetti ice cream at home you need the classic ingredients: two to three scoops of vanilla ice cream, cream, strawberry sauce and fine white chocolate shavings. The result looks like tomato sauce with parmesan – which is exactly how the sundae got its name. First, put the plate you want to serve it on in the freezer. The plate always has to be well chilled so the spaghetti doesn't melt into vanilla sauce. The press you use has to be well chilled too, or you'll end up with a vanilla sauce scandal. Making spaghetti ice cream yourself isn't that hard at all.
Making spaghetti ice cream with strawberry sauce and white chocolate
Make the strawberry sauce in advance so it's ready to use. If you're feeling lazy, you can buy a ready-made sauce. We don't recommend it, though, because the usual supermarket sauces are often syrups with more sugar than strawberries.
For the best strawberry sauce we recommend fresh strawberries. Wash and hull them first and freeze them briefly. That gives the sauce a more intense flavour and a deep red colour. Then warm the strawberries with sugar and lemon juice – a little tip from the ice cream experts: the tastiest sauce, with the most intense strawberry flavour, is made from 80–90% pure fruit.
For a classic spaghetti ice cream, start with a portion of cream on the chilled plate. Whip the cream until stiff, then press the scoops of vanilla ice cream through the spaghetti ice cream press (or spätzle press / potato ricer) on top. Add fresh strawberry sauce and finish with white chocolate shavings. If you can't find white chocolate shavings, just grate 50 g of white chocolate or couverture yourself. Many ice cream cafés also stick a wafer on top of the spaghetti mountain as decoration, and it's ready to serve. That does break the pasta-dish look a bit, but most people don't seem to mind.
If you want to recreate spaghetti ice cream at home, the question is how to get the vanilla ice cream into spaghetti shape without a special press. The easiest way is to use a frozen (!) spätzle press or potato ricer. If you don't have one at home, it gets tricky. It's worth getting one, though – not just because spaghetti ice cream is delicious, but because you can make spätzle and lots of other sweet or savoury dishes with it. You can buy a press online or in the supermarket from around 15 euros.
How do you spot a good spaghetti ice cream?
If you'd rather let a pro make the popular sundae at an ice cream café, it helps to keep a few points in mind to recognise a good one. First, everything should be well chilled. Many cafés keep their press and plates in the ice cream counter, where the flavours are kept cold too. So you can often tell at first glance whether everything is cold enough or whether a vanilla sauce scandal awaits. The most important quality marker is the ice cream itself – in the classic version, the vanilla. But how do you recognise a good vanilla ice cream? First, let's clear up a common misconception: good vanilla ice cream doesn't have to be yellow! The image of yellow vanilla ice cream dates back to the days when eggs were mainly used as a binder.
A lot has changed in ice cream making since then. Today plant-based binders such as locust bean gum and guar gum are mostly used instead of eggs. They're easier to work with, and there's no risk of salmonella. With these new binders, eggs have simply become obsolete in ice cream making. So pregnant women can enjoy a spaghetti ice cream at Katchi in Berlin without worrying. Ice cream without eggs is also much kinder to animals and the environment – thumbs up for locust bean gum.
Why vanilla ice cream is sometimes yellow
Still, vanilla ice cream often has a yellowish tint – both the industrial kind you find in the supermarket and the one in some ice cream parlours. There can be several reasons. Some ice cream makers use ground vanilla powder, caramelised sugar or even beta-carotene (a colouring) to give their ice cream a yellowish tone. Those ingredients don't really belong in a good classic vanilla ice cream. They still find their way in, though, because many customers learned to see yellow as a sign of quality, and yellow vanilla ice cream has always sold well.
A better sign of good vanilla ice cream is the black specks, which usually point to Bourbon vanilla. Bourbon vanilla is the key ingredient that gives the ice cream its delicious, characteristic vanilla taste. Sadly, many ice cream makers have caught on to this trick and now use ground vanilla pods that have already been used for flavour extraction, just to get black specks into the ice cream. Those ground pods have little flavour left – the flavour is in the seeds of the vanilla pod, also called vanilla caviar.
By the way, what applies to vanilla ice cream also applies to vanilla sugar. Not everything labelled vanilla actually contains real Bourbon vanilla. There are clear rules, though: BOURBON vanilla sugar has to contain real Bourbon vanilla. If the packaging just says vanilla, it may be artificial vanilla flavouring.
Why is it called Bourbon vanilla, anyway? It's named after the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, formerly called "Bourbon". The queen of spices has a soft, floral taste and costs around 5–8 € per pod in shops. Tahitian vanilla is an alternative for making a delicious vanilla ice cream. In industrial ice cream production especially, cheap vanilla flavouring is used instead of expensive real vanilla to cut costs.
In the end, many quality markers can be faked visually. The safest test is still the taste: try the vanilla ice cream, and if it tastes good, that's a good sign. Of course you don't have to remember all of this little lecture on good vanilla ice cream. But we hope you can now answer the question of why vanilla ice cream is yellow. (It isn't!!)
Back to spaghetti ice cream: what matters is that real Bourbon vanilla was used. The same goes for the strawberry sauce: natural ingredients matter here too – namely fresh strawberries. You can tell they're in the sauce because it's thicker and you can still see strawberry seeds. Industrial syrup is usually fairly clear and contains no bits of fruit.
Why the cream goes under the spaghetti ice cream
The cream freezes where it touches the ice cream, which creates that typical crunchy layer. But the cream isn't only placed under the ice cream for the crunch. It's hidden underneath so it doesn't spoil the pasta-dish look. It also stops the ice cream from sliding around. Another bonus: the size of the noodle mountain grows exponentially with the amount of cream – and as the saying goes, the biggest spaghetti ice cream is the best one. (Or something like that.)
Speaking of size: the record for the world's biggest spaghetti ice cream was also set in Germany. In 2019, ice cream maker Tiziano Floris and his wife Lorena from Gelateria Alessio made the world's biggest spaghetti ice cream in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It was a creamy 80 cm wide, 160 cm long, 150 cm high and weighed over 270 kg. No wonder making this monster took over a week. Afterwards it was cut down to sundae size, sold and eaten. The sale raised a cool 4,500 €, which was donated to a children's playground.
Is there vegan spaghetti ice cream?
There are now good vegan alternatives for every ingredient in spaghetti ice cream. That means vegans can enjoy the popular sundae too. Cream from cow's milk is fairly easy to replace with vegan cream, usually made from oats or soy. Strawberry sauce is naturally vegan, and the white chocolate shavings are easy to replace too – with vegan white chocolate, fine desiccated coconut or coconut flakes, for example. Finding a substitute for Bourbon vanilla ice cream is harder, though.
To give vanilla ice cream its characteristic creaminess and light, creamy taste, you have to experiment quite a bit. Many vegan ice creams use nut butter or fruit purée as a base. That's tricky for vegan vanilla, because both have a dominant flavour of their own. Using strawberry or coconut sorbet instead of vanilla scoops is simply something different from Bourbon vanilla.
Almond butter or almond milk made from it often has a strong flavour of its own too, because it's mostly made from brown roasted almonds. With unroasted white almonds the flavour is much milder, but products made from white almonds are much harder to find. They just don't have much taste. That's why vegan vanilla ice cream is often made from soy. Katchi doesn't use soy, though, because it's a common allergen. On top of that, we make our own plant-based milk bases for our ice creams to cut down on packaging, which is difficult with soy milk.
Vegan spaghetti ice cream variations
But if you come to Katchi Ice Cream wanting a vegan spaghetti ice cream, you certainly don't have to go home disappointed. There are plenty of other vegan flavours, such as a choice of fruit sorbets, that work well instead of vanilla. If you want to keep the classic look, go for coconut ice cream, top it with strawberry sauce and of course don't forget the white chocolate. If an ice cream café doesn't have vegan white sprinkles, go for the dark chocolate shavings – most of them are vegan anyway.
If you like discovering new tastes, try the tropical version with mango sorbet and raspberry sauce. For chocolate lovers, Katchi also has chocolate sauce – and here's the good news for all vegans: at Katchi all sauces are vegan! In general, any flavour works as a base for spaghetti ice cream, except flavours with chunks. Stracciatella or the Willy Wonka Chocolate Bomb sadly can't be pushed through the press, because their chocolate or brownie pieces clog the holes.
Conclusion: spaghetti ice cream can do more than vanilla
These days there are lots of spaghetti ice cream variations, with vegan ice cream as well as dairy. The classic version with vanilla ice cream, cream, strawberry sauce and white chocolate shavings will probably stay Germany's favourite sundae, though. Who exactly invented it is unclear, but it's certain that it was invented by Italians in Germany. We're just glad spaghetti ice cream is so widespread that we can get the delicious sundae almost everywhere in Germany – here in Berlin, too.