Dairy Queen Reese's Blizzard

I have unearthed quite the frozen dairy dessert history in this post. This is only the second post on Big Muddy written about a fast food frozen dairy dessert.

During my drive back to Eldon after spring break, I decided I was really craving ice cream. (But when am I not?) I decided to stop in Warrenton to get a DQ Blizzard.

This is the small size. 

After much deliberation, I decided on the Reese's Blizzard. It just so happened, without me knowing it before it happened, that I had stopped into Dairy Queen THE day they were introducing their new way of serving Blizzards. Dairy Queen will now flip their Blizzard upside down before they serve it to you. If it spills or drips, you get one free. The St. Louisans in my readership will find this practice quite familiar. ~~~~major foreshadowing~~~~

EDIT: The flipping of the Blizzards is not new, but this new campaign of getting a free Blizzard, if it drips or something, I believe is new. Or just making this a national policy in all stores is new. Or they are just promoting it more. Or something. Either way the girl who served me mine had to be reminded to flip my Blizzard before serving it to me.

For those of you that live under a rock, a Blizzard is soft serve ice cream blended with various mix-ins, like candy, cookies, etc. Again, St. Louisans might realize that if I had replaced the phrase "soft serve ice cream" with "frozen custard" I would be talking about the Ted Drewes classic, a concrete. So the question arises: who did it first?

The answer? Ted Drewes. In fact, Dairy Queen straight up stole the idea when they introduced the Blizzard in 1986. They even admitted to stealing the idea from Ted Drewes in this very interesting New York Times article published back in 1986. What doesn't make sense to me is why people don't continue to credit Ted Drewes with the invention. Kind of like how when St. Louis Bread Co went national, the name of the stores in areas besides St. Louis was Panera. People think St. Louis doesn't have good food because the rest of the world for some strange reason is trying to hide the fact that there are all of these tasty foods that started in St. Louis!! Argh.

If you ever gotten, the real (and much better, but I will get to that in a bit) deal, you know that a concrete is always turned upside down before handed to you. This is because the frozen custard as thick as concrete, hence the name, so it won't fall out of the cup when turned upside down. However, a Blizzard is made with soft serve. Nothing about soft serve makes me think that it should be turned upside down. Also Dairy Queen, as far as I can tell, isn't crediting the idea of serving their Blizzards upside down to Ted Drewes. I have tweeted at Dairy Queen to try to find out why they are doing this new campaign to serve Blizzards upside down. If I get a response, I will let you, my Dearest Readers, know as soon as possible.

Now to review my Dairy Queen Reese's Blizzard, which I will shamelessly compare to a Ted Drewes concrete now that I know they shamelessly stole the idea from Ted Drewes. So the soft serve in a Blizzard is definitely smoother and creamier than soft serve you would get in a cone. But it isn't nearly as thick as a concrete, nor as rich. However, it is significantly less fake tasting and richer than McDonald's McFlurry. Obviously the Reese's tasted good. There were a variety of sizes of Reese's and you definitely got some peanut butter cup in each bite. However, I would have been okay with a few more of the bigger chunks of Reese's.  All in all a Blizzard is a good choice when you don't have access to frozen custard and is relatively cheap. It would never be something, however, that I would choose over Ted Drewes. Obviously.