Surreal Creamery Brought My Wildest Dairy Dreams to Life

Here’s a tasty brain-teaser: Surreal Creamery, a below-ground storefront on MacDougal Street with another NYC location in Kips Bay, has 12 ice cream flavor options and 27 classic American snack food toppings. With a 4-topping limit for milkshakes and soft serve Mason Jar creations, how many possible flavor combinations does Surreal offer?

I used this high-school primer on 'Permutations and Combinations,’ and got 210,600 options. Friends, check my work, please; I’m a man, not a math-a-magician.

Surreal offers a few solid base case Mason Jar creations: Matcha ice cream with with Lucky Charms and caramel syrup (the ‘Matcha Made in Heaven’); Taro ice cream with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a graham cracker (the ‘Know Your Roots’); Earl Grey ice cream with caramel syrup, Reese’s Puffs and Lady Fingers (the ‘Earl Grey Everyday.’)

I opted to create my own Mason Jar, figuring that the pure scope of possible flavor combinations, combined with my intuition, would equate to instant soft serve serendipity.

To the untrained eye, my choice of Cookie Monster ice cream (a.k.a. Blue vanille), Teddy Grahams, Oreos, Biscoff cookies and chocolate syrup is as random a mish-mash as any. But all three cookies share a similar dry texture, Biscoff and Teddy Grahams have a similar cinnamon-y flavor profile, the Cookie Monster ice cream has ‘cookie’ in the name — see what I’m doing here? This is art, people.

Put it all together, stir it all around, do the hokey-pokey — BANG! Soft serve cookie-crunch genius. I call it, the ‘Take It EZ, BDZ.’

The ‘Take It EZ, BDZ’ was beautiful to behold but almost prohibitively unwieldy for transport; I know I looked quite silly tottering my way down the crowded Macdougal Street sidewalk, frantically scooping at my leaning tower of blue ice cream and slurping at trails of syrup on the jar.

Then again, what would a late-summer Saturday be without slurping up melting ice cream? The ‘Take It EZ, BDZ’ — empowered by Surreal’s extensive munchies menu — was sweet, refreshing, abundantly crunchy, and delicious.

Obviously delicious, it was freakin’ Biscoff, oreos and Teddy Grahams in ice cream. Shootin’ fish in a barrel, here.

An 8.4 out of 10 for Surreal. Maybe a computer program could run some optimization algorithm for deliciousness and create a better flavor profile than the 'Take It EZ, BDZ'; but until the computers take over, I’m just gonna keep using my intuition. And a very, very, very little bit of math.

Until next time.