Ben & Jerry's Short-Lived Sweet Potato Pie Flavor
Unfortunately for adventurous ice cream enthusiasts, Ben & Jerry's has a graveyard where unpopular ice cream flavors go to die — although if you're really passionate about a discontinued flavor, you are able to vote to bring it back (via Ben & Jerry's). The list of ice cream flavors laid to rest includes Turtle Soup, Fossil Fuel, and Schweddy Balls, according to their website. While they may not have tasted great, some of the retired flavors are still iconic — after all, who can forget Ben & Jerry's Wavy Gravy ice cream, a rainbow pint inspired by a Bohemian Woodstock emcee?
While you can see the Flavor Graveyard on the Ben & Jerry's website, it's actually a real thing (well, as real as an ice cream cemetery can be). Located behind the corporation's factory in Vermont, the Flavor Graveyard features headstones with some parting words for each flavor no longer with us. For example, according to their website, the Oh Pear headstone reads, "Oh Pear, Oh Pear, a mixture of mirth, all nannies did weep, when you left of this earth." Pretty heart-wrenching, no?
One ice cream flavor with a particularly short shelf life was based on sweet potatoes. We know that sweet potato can be successfully used in desserts like sweet potato casserole, but in this case, the headstone laments, "No one could appreciate it, so we had to let it die."
Miz Jelena's short-lived sweet potato pie
Dubbed "Miz Jelena's Sweet Potato Pie," Ben & Jerry's described the ice cream flavor as their "attempt to recreate a treasured southern side dish as a delectable pint" (via Ben & Jerry's). Usually eaten around Thanksgiving, the roots of sweet potato pie in the U.S. date back to slavery in the South, when African-Americans mashed up spiced sweet potatoes for dessert, according to Southern Kitchen. Sweet potato pie today is generally made with lots of sweet potatoes, butter, sugar, and comforting fall spices like cinnamon and nutmeg (via Allrecipes). The Ben & Jerry's flavor, however, was composed of ginger ice cream with a fudge swirl, according to their website. Since sweet potato pie usually doesn't have any chocolate and isn't centered around ginger, could this be where Ben & Jerry's missed the mark?
The flavor was only on shelves for a short time, from 1992 to 1993. Since then, it doesn't appear that the American Ben & Jerry's has made another attempt at sweet potato ice cream. If you're not willing to give up, you may want to take a trip to Tokyo, Japan, to try Murasaki Imotion, the Ben & Jerry's purple sweet potato ice cream with purple sweet potato bits (via Huffington Post). Here in America, we'll continue to pay our respects to Miz Jelena.