Spaghettieis: The Sweet Dish That Looks Like A Savory Meal

Most of you were probably informed at some point in your childhood that you shouldn't play with your food. While sticky child fingers and a messy tabletop are something that the authority figure in your life would want to avoid, that oft-repeated scolding message falls apart when confronted with the creativity of the culinary sphere.

Countless food innovators have created sweet treats that bear a striking resemblance to savory meals. You've probably seen brightly colored gummy hamburgers in the grocery store candy aisle, but that only breaks the surface of the disguised dessert world. In an interview with Insider, chef Ben Churchill explained the delicate processes behind his myriad meal mimicries, which include realistically runny egg yolk, a pair of chocolate cakes designed to look like chili peppers, and even a fake ashtray. "Is It Cake?" is a Netflix series that has bakers attempt to fool a panel of celebrity judges into thinking that their elaborate cake constructions are inedible objects. In a similar vein, spaghettieis is an ice cream dish that is designed to look like a heaping plate of pasta.

Spaghettieis, as the name suggests, is gelato that looks exactly like spaghetti. Instead of pasta, the dish features a base of vanilla gelato. Spaghettieis is made to look like noodles by being pushed through a spätzle press, a type of pasta extruder intended for use in the making of egg noodles.

No plate of pasta would be complete without a generous dollop of sauce. On a plate of spaghettieis, savory tomato sauce is replaced with a similar red topping, sweet strawberry jam. Additionally, you can make it appear that your spaghettieis is covered in a sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese by shaving white chocolate. If you want meatballs with your spaghettieis, a balled-up brownie could be a convincing stand-in.

It's tough to pick an element of spaghettieis that doesn't sound delicious, but the dish hasn't always been universally beloved. When spaghettieis was first introduced, it caused children to cry, as they were convinced that the ice cream parlor their parents had brought them to only served spaghetti.

It's possible that people have been enjoying pasta for thousands of years, but spaghetti and meatballs are an Italian-American invention that only emerged around the time of the transition between 1800 and 1900. It was an even longer time before a sweet spin on this staple dinner dish found its way onto plates.

Spaghettieis, an innovative ice cream dessert, was created by German confectioner Dario Fontanella in 1969. You may be surprised that a German man is behind this Italian-American ice cream treat, but Fontanella's father had emigrated from his native Italy in the '30s, so he made spaghettieis to honor his ancestral homeland.

Spaghettieis has become a staple sweet treat in Germany, which can be attributed in large part to the fact that its inventor never put a patent on his spaghetti ice cream. The dish even earned Fontanella a Bloomaulorden award, a prestigious decoration given to civic-minded citizens of Manhein, Germany.