The “tasting day”: why buying 5 babkas at once is an underrated source of meaning

One of my favourite ways to take an ordinary day and give it some extra meaning, or make it more memorable, is to turn the day into a “tasting” day.

In 2025, I did the following tastings: pistachio ice cream, babka, French fries from NYC restaurants, Taleggio cheese, ice cream from one particular shop in Spain, and NYC shawarma restaurants.

The structure works like this: instead of buying one container of your favourite ice cream, buy 4-6 of the top brands. Gather your partner or a group of friends and taste them one by one. Share opinions as you go, and once you’ve tried them all, rank your choices to declare a definitive winner.

Often the costs of doing this are minimal. Buying five babkas isn’t all that expensive—even if you end up giving away some of the leftovers—and if you buy five pistachio ice creams, you will likely be able to finish them all…eventually.

In a strict sense, the superficial benefit is that you now know which of category X is your favourite, so you can exclusively consume that going forward.

The real benefit, however, is the shared experience. While it may feel really indulgent to buy five different pistachio ice creams, this indulgence is the point. So many evenings blend together, but you will remember the time you ate five pistachio ice creams in one evening. The extra $40 isn’t food waste; it is a shockingly cheap price to pay to manufacture a guaranteed memory.

It serves as a social coordination mechanism. Rather than a vague proposal to “hang out,” a mission to taste five different babkas creates a shared goal. It transforms a passive hang into an active project, while also becoming a reference point for your group to quote and look back upon.

It is incredibly fun to talk through with the group: which is your favourite, what you like about them, and why. There is a specific excitement in going through the tasting—trying to guess which will win, feeling the anticipation for what’s next, and seeing if others share your preferences.

Most importantly, the exercise of putting so much focus on taste helps you form your own sense of what you like, rather than relying on some Reddit list of “the best babka in NYC.” I think this generalizes: the more you can confidently know which are your favourite babkas, the better you can know your preferences on other things, becoming less reliant on others for your sense of what you enjoy.

There isn’t much more to say here, and this isn’t so profound. Just go buy five different brands of your favourite ice cream, gather a friend or two, and spend an evening trying them all at once.

So with all that said, my review of my favourite tastings of 2025:

1. Pistachio Ice cream (the first tasting my girlfriend and I did)

2. French fries (I loved having French fries as my entire dinner)

3. Taleggio (this is the most useful as my gf and I eat Taleggio 2x per week)

4. Babka (this felt the most indulgent and the silliest)

5. Spanish ice cream (the shop we got the ice cream from was good but not the best)

6. NYC Shawarma (shawarma in NYC is far worse than it should be)

tastings of 2025