Milk sweets
Hokey pokey ice cream
Vanilla ice cream studded with crunchy lumps of honeycomb toffee, New Zealand's favourite flavour.
Hokey pokey ice cream is plain vanilla ice cream with small, solid lumps of honeycomb toffee mixed through. The toffee, itself called hokey pokey in New Zealand, is made by boiling sugar and golden syrup and stirring in baking soda so it foams and sets full of bubbles. It is often named as New Zealand's most popular ice cream flavour.
What goes in
- Cream and milk862%, Vanilla ice cream base.
- Sugar215%, In the base and the toffee.
- Honeycomb toffee215%, Golden syrup, sugar and baking soda.
- Vanilla18%, Flavours the base.
Rough parts by weight. The ring shows each input's share of the product.
Made step by step
Each drawing shows the operation for that step. Quantities and timings differ from house to house and herd to herd; this is one traditional way, in outline.
Step 1: Boil Boil sugar and golden syrup, then stir in baking soda so it foams. Step 2: Set Pour the toffee out to set and break it into small lumps. Step 3: Churn Churn cream, milk, sugar and vanilla into ice cream. Step 4: Set Fold in the toffee lumps and freeze. Step 5: Serve Serve in cones. Finished Hokey pokey ice cream, by share.
A New Zealand classic
Hokey pokey ice cream has been made commercially in New Zealand since the middle of the twentieth century, and it became a fixture of dairies, the country's corner shops, and summer holidays. The name hokey pokey was used in nineteenth-century Britain and America for cheap ice cream sold in the street.
Milk and cream
New Zealand keeps one of the largest dairy herds in the world for its size, most of it grazing pasture all year. Ice cream is one of many uses for the country's milk, and local makers compete over the size and crunch of the toffee pieces. The toffee is also sold on its own and dipped in chocolate.
Where it is used
The breeds behind it
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Sources and further reading
Original text and drawings by the EveryCow desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. The shares are a rough, illustrative ratio, not a recipe: every family and dairy makes it differently. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Holstein Friesian: Vista Alegre baserria, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Jersey: Man vyi, Public domain, source