How do you eat your chocolate coated ice cream bars?

As far as I know there are two basic ways to eat a chocolate coated ice cream bar. You can just bite it, taking pieces of chocolate and chunks of ice cream in one motion of your jaw. Or you can painstakingly pick the slim chocolate outside off and then eat the ice cream.

I suppose you could also lick the chocolate outside, but that would probably take too long. By the time you got through the chocolate, all the ice cream would have already melted and run down the stick onto your hand where it would be sticky and leave you unhappy.

So that leaves the two main ways to eat these bars of goodness on a stick. But before I break down each one, I'd like to indulge in a brief aside about the name of ice cream bars.

They should be called popsicles.

You see, they're on a stick. Anything you eat off a wooden stick should be a popsicle. But it seems the boxes of ice cream coated in a hard chocolate shell on a stick label them as ice cream bars. (Erroneously in my opinion.)

Trademark law might have something to do with that. But in my world ice cream bars should be things you pick up to eat with your hands, like Klondike Bars and ice cream sandwiches. For the purpose of clarity in this piece, I've compromised and decided to call them ice cream bars, though.

Now, without further ado, let's break down the two methods of eating a so-called ice cream bar.

Chomp them: You get the perfect mix of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. The textures of the fluffy ice cream and thick chocolate meld perfectly. You don't get too much chocolate conforming to your teeth because the ice cream is there to wash it away. Plus, if you have sensitive teeth, that chocolate coating shields them from the cold as you bite in.


Strip them: This is the option for people who only eat one thing off their dinner plate at a time. If you can't eat your steak until you finish the potatoes, this is your route. The problem is that it's not easy to get the coating off -- by the time you do half the ice cream is gone along with it. Plus, the ice cream that's on the bar isn't the highest quality to begin with. That's why it's buried underneath chocolate on an ice cream bar instead of in some vat at Cold Stone.

I bet you can tell which technique I prefer -- chomping. So how do you eat your chocolate covered ice cream bar? If you have your own unique style, feel free to share.