If there’s one thing that you can always count on at the Calgary Stampede, it’s that the Midway will be packed to the brim with the good, the bad, and the downright weird eats.
The Calgary Stampede 2024 is no different, with perhaps one of the weirdest menu items seen at the 10-day festival: Cheeseburger soft serve.
Against our better judgment, the Dished team had to go check out the new nausea-inducing snack for ourselves.
The Cheeseburger soft serve is described as a vanilla-infused, BBQ-flavoured ice cream — and, importantly, it’s meat-free. It’s served in a waffle cone, dipped in cheese sprinkled with sesame seeds, and garnished with a pickle and an onion ring.
It also retails for a whopping $13, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any ice cream worth breaking your Stampede budget for.
It definitely gives off a cheeseburger vibe to look at, right down to the garnishes. While the soft serve itself could easily pass as a delicious swirl of chocolate, that certainly is not the case here.
On first taste, it’s certainly… meaty, which is never a word you want to associate with ice cream. While there’s definitely some vanilla there, it does nothing to cancel out any of the savoury taste.
That’s before you even get to the cheese, pickle, and onion ring. We can’t say we had high hopes for this, but it really exceeded our expectations — and not in a good way.
For $13 per cone, we’d highly recommend saving yourself from a world of pain and tracking down an actual burger.
Overall, this was definitely a case of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”
Have you tried the Cheeseburger soft serve at the Calgary Stampede? Let us know you’re thoughts in the comments.