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All Hail the Snickers Ice Cream Bar, the True King of the Freezer

This is what perfection looks like. Photo: Melissa Hom

Everyone looks forward to summer for a different reason. For some, it’s the promise of weekend beach getaways. For others, it’s park picnics and fresh summer produce. And for a select few — the people who really get it — summer is the best time of year because it is Snickers Ice Cream Bar season.

First things first: The Snickers Ice Cream Bar is superior to nonfrozen Snickers bars. Full stop. The regular, inferior candy bar is cloying and aggressive in its sweetness. It is a primitive, rough product — like the candy engineers got halfway to their goal and just gave up. A Snickers Ice Cream Bar, pulled fresh from the freezer, is an altogether different creature: Softer, gentler, an improbable feat of food engineering that carries itself with a quiet, confident sophistication.

It is, in other words, perfect: The chocolate shell is delicate without feeling too fragile. The peanut butter ice cream is somehow both smooth and fluffy (whereas many premade ice-cream treats just seem… flat?). Caramel swirls and peanuts get extra texture from their brief freeze. And, while most American candy options tend to come in portions so oversized they’re silly, a regular-sized Snickers Ice Cream Bar is just right. It feels like a single very nice treat, not some kind of extravagant indulgence.

I love a good ice cream sandwich, but some things are not up for negotiation: Snickers Ice Cream Bars are the best ice-cream delivery method ever created by a huge corporation and available in freezers everywhere. I like Klondike Bars and all, but they’re just a substitute for the good stuff when it’s not available. San Francisco can keep its “beloved” It’s-Its. (They come in green tea now; GTFOH.) Choco Tacos are mostly soggy wafers that only wish they could be real waffle cones.

Snickers has not bribed Grub with a lifetime supply of ice-cream bars. This is not spon-con. This is the thinking of someone who comes from a hotbed of American ice-cream love — New England — and has eaten enough scoops from neighborhood shops, fancy gelato, and Flurries to have a keenly developed sense for ice-cream excellence. So, yes, sure, I’ll make stops on road trips for soft-serve stands, or any scoop shop that sells a black-raspberry flavor. But is is not, and never will be, a well-rounded summer ice-cream diet without some Snickers.

All Hail Snickers Ice Cream Bars, True Kings of the Freezer