I feel like it’s not. Hear me out: the texture is way more firm than what you get in a tub and it will usually have a shell that further changes the texture.
I’m not even sure what you mean by ice cream bar; I feel there’s a lot of room there for different kinds of things that may or may not be ice cream. Some are definitely ice cream with a chocolate coating on a stick, others are just “ice candy”, basically frozen juice.
I think of the cream bars with the coating on a stick. It’s definitely still a cream based thing but I guess I feel like ice cream is to broad a name to encompass the experience of the bars, the tubs, soft-serve, and drumsticks
I see what you’re saying. But I think the bars you’re describing are basically ice cream in a different form. Like I wouldn’t call “drumsticks” their own category even, that’s just an ice cream cone. Shape doesn’t change the product so much for me. Others get more complicated, though, like ice cream sandwiches and mochi ice cream; they’re still primarily ice cream at least. Soft-serve feels quite different to me, but then that opens up a whole can of worms about different levels of milk fats getting different names.
I guess what I’m saying is I’m not sure there’s much else to do except to accept ‘ice cream’ as a pretty broad umbrella term. Perhaps we need a new term to denote tub style ice cream specifically?
