Wendy's Strawberry Frosty (Nick O'Malley, MassLive)

The new Wendy’s Strawberry Frosty tastes like they opened up the Vanilla Frosty machine and poured in a bottle of the glossy red Hershey’s syrup you’d use to make a glass of strawberry milk.

Actually, now that I think of it, there’s a non-zero chance that’s actually how Wendy’s went about putting this thing on the menu.

It’s not complicated. It’s not fancy. But the Strawberry Frosty is a pleasant surprise to a formula that hasn’t really been tinkered with in the roughly half-century that the Frosty has been on the Wendy’s menu.

Until now, there’s been vanilla and there’s been chocolate (for the most part). It’s basically the opposite of what Oreo has been doing. You want something crazy like “Snickerdoodle Cookie Butter” or “Chicken & Waffles Salted Red Velvet Birthday Cake Latte?” Folks, this is a Wendy’s. You can take yourself down the street to Dairy Queen with that nonsense.

Of course, there’s a reason that Wendy’s doesn’t tinker with the formula too much. It’s a logistical nightmare.

By the way, did we mention that, while strawberry is on the menu, vanilla is no longer available?

Out of the many cogs that make up the fine-tuned burger behemoth that is the modern fast food industry, there is no single entity that gums up the works and brings the system crashing down quite like an ice cream machine.

Whenever the robot apocalypse comes, humanity’s greatest champion will be whoever designed the ice cream machine for McDonald’s, because nowhere else is there a machine that has critical failures on a global scale quite like that.

Meanwhile, for Wendy’s, it’s apparently too much of a lift to get a third Frosty line available for every restaurant. So instead of adding a new flavor to the menu, they’re just swapping out vanilla for strawberry.

Again, I’m starting to convince myself that Wendy’s grand plan for getting this thing out was to mail out a bottle of strawberry syrup to every restaurant and instructions on how to pop open the lid.

What does it taste like?

It’s a strawberry milk-flavored version of the Vanilla Frosty. That’s a good thing.

Strawberry is a flavor that plays well in artificial settings (unlike, for example, banana). If you take a neutral, sweet base like a Vanilla Frosty and add strawberry flavoring to it, the end result is hard to screw up.

You can see that at work here as the Strawberry Frosty pops with a nice rosy tang of strawberry flavor. The sweetness level is similar to the vanilla version. It’s just tweaked with strawberry flavor.

The strawberry flavor is laid on thick, with this rounded, bright glow that stops short of being overly sweet. It’s not like those strawberry hard candies that grandparents hand out.

Once the frosty gets a little melty -- and let’s face it, it will during the summer months -- it takes on this delightfully milky, foamy quality that really played it the similarities to strawberry milk.

So is it any good?

Oh yeah. This thing is great. It’s a frosty that tastes like strawberry milk. It’s sweet and delicious and refreshing enough to keep you wanting more. I want to get some fries dipped into this thing.

I feel like Wendy’s doesn’t get enough credit for basically making a new form of ice cream.

A Frosty is a remarkable ice cream chimera that falls somewhere between soft-serve ice cream and a milkshake. You can eat it with a spoon or drink it with a straw. It’s a modern marvel of science and it’s surprising that no one else has tried to copy the formula.

Then again, McDonald’s is out here and can’t even get their ice cream machines to work. Wendy’s would never.

“I ate it so you don’t have to” is a regular food column looking at off-beat eats, both good and bad. It runs every other Thursday-ish at noon-ish.

You can send any praise/food suggestions to nomalley@masslive.com. Please send all criticism and complaints the McDonald’s ice cream machine breaking to jschulman-hall@masslive.com. You can check out the rest of the series here.

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