Mustard ice-cream is hot stuff in France

The scorching weather this summer has generated a boom in ice-cream sales in France - and a colourful explosion of exotic and bizarre flavours.

Lovers of ice-cream can now eat glaces that taste of grass or are flavoured with mustard, Roquefort cheese or oysters.

"Twenty years ago some of these flavours would have been regarded as totally dotty," said Ludovic Enée, a Paris chef who specialises in outlandish desserts. "Nobody is shocked any more."

Most of the stranger offerings can be found only in restaurants, where there is a gourmet trend towards salty or spicy ice-creams and sorbets that are served as part of a starter or main dish, not as a dessert.

However, even purveyors of ice-creams in cones are tempting le grand public with Earl Grey ice-cream and lemon thyme sorbet this summer. The company Pôle Sud, which supplies restaurateurs, makes 1,200 flavours. One of its sorbets is made from beetroot in balsamic vinegar. It was once asked to make a sorbet flavoured with cigar smoke but admits that on that occasion it failed.

Didier Barral, president of Pôle Sud, says that ice-cream is like any other form of cuisine: there is no reason to stick with the obvious. "The challenge with ice-cream is to resolve paradoxes," he said. "Hot with cold, soft with crunchy ... We bought in grass that was extra clean. Then we cleaned it again and again before we made a kind of grass tea and turned it into sorbet."

The result is said to be refreshingly bitter and hauntingly dry. If you want to really spoil an overheated horse or cow this summer, give it a grass glace.