Emerging ice cream blends are profiled

This is the hottest frozen thing around. Spicy, salty, savory ice creams - concoctions such as bitter basil, salty caramel, spicy chocolate, and curried coconut - are lined up in freezers and scoop shops. They're hot in more ways than one. Even though they're icy, some are so spicy the heat is startling.

Wine Gallery in Brookline receives pints of "Naga," a curry and coconut "haute glace" (you can call it ice cream) from Chicago's Vosges Haut-Chocolate, and they sell out within a day. Naga is a heavy scoop with thick spicy layers of cumin, ginger, and chili, smoothed out by the coconut cream. It makes a heavenly banana sundae, striped in chocolate and caramel sauce. When Wine Gallery customers find it in stock, a once- or twice-a-month occurrence, they react in "an over-the-top manner," says buyer Wes Narron. The reactions aren't the only thing over-the-top - the stuff sells for a cool $7.99 a pint.

If a scoop of curried coconut ice cream doesn't appeal to you, you may be more satisfied with something chocolate and icy and laced with cayenne pepper. Or a creamy mixture churned with aromatic basil. The scoops are on restaurant menus too.

Ten Tables in Jamaica Plain serves a chocolate terrine with a scoop of house-made Thai basil ice cream and sea salt. The Thai variety adds a "minty, herbaceous flavor" that has become the restaurant's "signature dessert," says chef David Punch. The salty, herby trio - a collaboration between Punch and pastry chef Alison Hearn - also headlines the dessert menu at Ten Tables' new Cambridge location.

On the tasting table at the Wine Gallery, you can try Vosges's Naga truffle, which inspired the chocolate company to venture into ice cream in the first place. The truffle flavor "launched the company," says Sonja Drummond, who presides over the counter at one of the three Chicago Vosges boutiques.

Sampling some unusual flavors may take planning. If you can stall a few days for your fix, Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, which mail orders pints, is worth the wait. It doesn't sell retail in the Boston area (gotta go to Brooklyn) but for $10 the company will ship boxes of six or nine pints to your door. The Queen City Cayenne is a deceptively simple chocolate ice cream that ignites on the way down and keeps you dipping in for another cool spoonful to drench the fire. Then it happens all over again with the next bite.

While the Cayenne is a tricky devil, Jeni's Salty Caramel is pure heaven. The salt and sweet vie for prominence, but it's a dead heat, a well tuned balance. Like a French caramel, the two flavors chase each other around your mouth. A pint of Queen City Cayenne is a whole lot of ice cream; a pint of Salty Caramel is just not enough. Order two.

"A really really sweet ice cream is an American thing," says Sam Mehr, lead ice cream maker at Toscanini's in Cambridge. "Many of our flavors are not American things." The ice cream shop has experimented with salty flavors, and with spicy additions such as cayenne, marinated Spanish chilies, peppercorns, and dried jalapeno, as well as savory herb flavors.

The herbs are "a lot of work and expensive, but they can be wonderful," says Toscanini owner Gus Rancatore, especially a "basil that was perfect with berries."

Toscanini's Spicy Banana is gently flavored with black pepper, and the mellow spice yields quickly to the sweetness of the banana. This is a good place for the curious but tentative to start. Aztec Chocolate is another story. Like Jeni's spicy chocolate, Toscanini's version burns a path down the throat and catches you in a vicious scoop cycle. "It boosts business," Mehr says.

Aztec is among the most popular of Toscanini's unusual flavors, along with salty caramel, a tart lemon sorbet, lavender, and khulfi, a cardamom and pistachio confection inspired by the traditional Indian dessert, which has been popular for some years now.

Not every flavor does so well. Some experiments end up to be what Mehr calls "sampling flavors: everyone tries it, nobody buys it." Others never even get their 15 minutes in the freezer, like Tomato-Tabasco Sorbet, a customer suggestion that ranks high.

"When you get right down to it, ice cream is sugar and fat and there's only so many combinations you can come up with before you start getting redundant," Mehr says. But this trend in flavors begs the question: ice cream for dinner? "I doubt it," he says. "We've made bacon ice cream, but ice cream has a pretty firm foundation as dessert."

With dessert like this, who needs dinner?