Peering through the glass on the freezer case I see some vanilla ice cream over on the right, and right in front there is coffee ice cream, my favorite. Then rounding out the selection of ice cream —well, ice milk actually— flavors are black sesame, taro, red bean, green bean, mango, macapuno, peach, and Thai tea. No chocolate.

I’m in the Marina Foods supermarket in Union City, California, about fifty miles from San Francisco. Marina Foods is an Asian market, where just buying ice cream requires research. The exotic flavors are imported from San Francisco, where they are made by the Polly Ann Ice Cream Company. There is a Polly Ann retail ice cream store in the City, said to feature over 500 flavors with a wheel to spin for adventurous selection. Take that, Howard Johnson, with your meager 28 flavors, and Baskin-Robbins, with your scarcely-less-meager 31. One of the Polly Ann flavors is called gasoline.

I set my sights on macapuno. Macapuno, I discovered, is an odd variety of coconut from the Philippines. Macapuno tastes like coconut, but it’s soft and stringy, unlike regular coconut, which is the tasty cousin of high density polyethylene. The ice cream box calls it young coconut. Macapuno is sold in jars as a basic ingredient.

The taro flavor is subtitled as ube on the package. Ube is type of yam with a bright violet color. It’s one on the few foods with that color, and also one of a relative handful beginning with the letter u. Those facts may be useful to you in an odd set of circumstances. Making a dessert from yams is not unknown to Americans familiar with sweet potato pie.

Wei-chuan, the brand on packages on the top row, and Polly Ann Ice Cream Company are apparently the same organization.

The Burnt Lumpia blog provides macapuno lore and an original recipe for the ice cream.