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Drop By Your Local Dairy Queen And Dive Into A Delicious Dilly Bar

Ken Hoffman King Features Syndicate

This week, I reached out for a Dilly Bar at Dairy Queen.

Here’s the blueprint: 3 ounces of frozen ice milk dipped in chocolate, with a tongue depressor stuck in the middle. Open wide and say, “Aahhhhh!”

Total calories: 210. Fat grams: 13.

Dilly Bars come in other flavors like cherry and butterscotch, but the true connoisseur will only dabble in vanilla ice milk covered in deep, dark chocolate.

He filled the lid from a quart jar with his regular soft-serve ice milk (Dairy Queen has to say ice milk because the product has only 5 percent butterfat, well below the 10 percent needed to qualify as ice cream).

Don’t ask why he had a tongue depressor lying around, either. A buddy took the first bite and said - and I’m totally serious - “This is a dilly!”

Good thing Dilly Bars weren’t invented in 1997 in a funky big city. They’d be called Def Jammin’ Chillin’ Bars. Dilly sounds better.

Dilly Bars are flash-frozen at zero degrees Fahrenheit, then dunked in a chocolate cone coating. The paraffin in the coating makes it stick to the ice milk. They go back in the freezer until lucky you pulls in to the drive-thru. (Regular soft Dairy Queen cones are about 23 degrees.) Dilly Bars are either made at the Dairy Queen factory and shipped to your local store, or they’re made fresh daily on site.

Here’s how to tell the difference: Locally made Dilly Bars have a little curl of chocolate on top, and the stick is a regulation-width tongue depressor. Dilly Bars from the factory don’t have the curl and resemble hockey pucks, only they’re tougher to bite into. And the stick is a lot thinner, like you find in an ordinary ice cream pop.

Maybe Dairy Queen could turn down the ice blaster a little. Dilly Bars are frozen harder than the smile on Kathie Lee Gifford’s face when she’s telling a terrific story about Cody. You could chip a tooth.

Let them soften up for a few minutes. Then nothing beats a Dilly Bar, especially when you’re running low on gas in the middle of nowhere and the nearest McDonald’s is two hours down the road.

The Drive-Thru Gourmet reviews offerings from various fast-food restaurants.

xxxx Dilly Bars were invented in 1956 by a Dairy Queen owner from Moline, Ill. He found some junk lying around the stockroom and decided to invent a new treat.