Ice Cream Sunday
We celebrate National Ice Cream Day by giving you the scoop on Northwest ice cream artisans
By Julie H. Case
Imagine it is a hot day in Rome, nearly 2,000 years ago. The sun is glancing off the colonnades. Emperor Nero is sweltering. What will satisfy the ruler? Ice cream, of course. Or ice cream in its early, early form. In A.D. 62, legend has it, Nero sent slaves to the Apennine Mountains. Their mission was to return with snow, which was to be mixed with honey, juices and fruit pulp. It was ice cream—or sorbet—of a rudimentary type.
In Italy, ice cream evolved from the flavored ices popular with Roman nobility as early as the fourth century B.C., according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, but Romans weren’t the first or only ones to experiment with this delicacy. The Persians are believed to have invented a chilled pudding-like dish, made with rosewater and vermicelli, in 400 b.c., and the Chinese are reputed to have mixed snow with ingredients such as honey, fruit and wine more than 3,000 years ago.
Myth has it that Marco Polo brought the idea of mixing snow and milk for a creamier confection to Italy in the 13th century after seeing the two items blended while on a trip to China, though there’s no historical evidence to support that theory.
The dessert seems to have been prized in the United States at least as far back as colonial times. In the 1770s, caterer Phillip Lenzi was advertising his confections—including ice creams—in a New York City newspaper.
Dolley Madison is said to have served ice cream at the White House during the Jefferson administration and at the second inaugural ball for her husband, James Madison, after his re-election.
As I savor a spoonful of butter pecan, I understand Dolley’s delight and Nero’s obsession with the sweet treat (though I have yet to understand how the Romans kept the snow from melting). There’s a reason ice cream is America’s favorite dessert—with more than 90 percent of U.S. households enjoying it. Indeed, the United States leads the world in production of ice cream and related frozen desserts, with nearly 1.6 billion gallons produced in 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
No wonder Ronald Reagan in 1984 proclaimed July as National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of the month as National Ice Cream Day.
Nowadays, there are nearly as many purveyors and flavors of ice cream as there are excuses for eating it. While no one complains when a pint of Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s appears in the freezer, the most savored ice creams often come from small artisan producers, men and women who make ice cream by the few hundred gallons a week—experimenting with flavors that range from “extreme chocolate” to jalapeño—and who consider their creations works of edible art.
Take, for instance, gourmet ice cream maker Toni Deskins, owner of Toni’s Sun Valley Ice Cream Company in central Idaho. Deskins has been an ice cream enthusiast since childhood, when she collected white dandelions in hopes of obtaining her most loved dessert. She’d blow on dozens of the feathery flowers, wishing for 5-gallon tubs of her favorite flavors of Baskin-Robbins—with very detailed instructions that the ice cream be left in the field behind her house. “I was always sure the neighbor kid took it,” she says.
These days, Deskins is busy wishing for inspiration and favorable prices on milk. Seven years ago the Sun Valley entrepreneur left her elementary-school teaching position to start her ice cream company. During peak season she crafts about 300 gallons of ice cream a week.
And, oh, the flavors those gallons come in. Her 30 rotating choices might include fire-roasted hazelnut, créme caramel, ginger, toasted coconut and traditionals such as an absolutely mouthwatering butter pecan that goes beyond sweet and creamy.
Another traditional, her ultimate chocolate ice cream, is so rich it is satiating in the smallest of spoonfuls. The butterfat content of Deskins’ ice creams is about 17 percent, comparable to super-premium brands on store shelves, which typically have butterfat of up to 16 percent, according to Robert Marshall, co-author of the book Ice Cream, which covers chemical and biological aspects of the production process as well as history and consumption. But because Deskins’ chocolate has a light, almost mousse-like texture, it seems practically sinless, despite tasting far more wicked than even the most expensive grocery-store variety.
And as wonderful as the traditionals are, where Deskins really shines is in the unexpected flavors she creates. Her toasted-coconut ice cream features real toasted flakes of nut meat so rich and smoky that even I, not a fan of coconut, go back for seconds. The chai tea ice cream tastes just like the drink, and her passion fruit ice cream perfectly combines tangy and sweet.
Deskins has made roasted-jalapeño and tequila granita flavors for Cinco de Mayo and a rose ice cream—with petals—for Valentine’s Day. And every year a winemaker calls on her to make a sorbet from one of its wines for the annual Sun Valley Center for the Arts Wine Auction (July 19–21 this year).
It’s easy for this ice cream artist to experiment with flavors because she consulted food chemists at the University of Idaho who analyzed her recipes to ensure the perfect balance of sugar, lipids, liquids and air, allowing her to focus on issues such as how to get the perfect zest in her fresh lemon ice cream. Not having to worry about errors in the basic product lets the artist in Toni come out and add verve via flavoring. The result for ice cream lovers is pure bliss.
The art of flavor also abounds at Mora Iced Creamery, an artisan ice cream company started in 2004 on Bainbridge Island, west of downtown Seattle, by Jerry Perez and his wife, Ana Orselli, who moved to the area from Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2002. They wanted their teenage daughters to have an education that involved extensive use of the English language, and Perez had been interested in Seattle ever since he was a youngster and became fascinated by the name of the SuperSonics basketball team.
Not to be missed is Mora’s South American–inspired dulce de leche, whose initial taste—sweet in the mouth, though not heavy—is followed by a mouthwatering moment right after, when the taste buds on the side of the tongue spring to life.
Then there’s the marron glacé with the French chestnuts preserved in syrup; the mora with its hand-smashed blackberries (mora means “blackberry” in Spanish); and the amazing gianduja—silky-smooth hazelnut-flavored chocolate featuring Oregon hazelnuts.
If a flavor calls for berries, nuts or other ingredients that are produced in the Northwest, that’s where Mora prefers to obtain them, along with fresh local milk that comes directly to Mora from two Washington dairies.
“Our goal is to produce every single one of our ice creams in the same way your great-grandmother would have done it in her own kitchen,” Perez says. There are no premixes or powders in Mora ice cream; everything is fresh and made from scratch. Mora may use a touch of extract such as vanilla to help the flavors achieve full effect, but there’s no coloring, no artificial additions. The ice cream makers squeeze every lemon and pink grapefruit and smash every strawberry and blackberry by hand, serving up taste sensations to appreciative customers.
“Ice cream is a fun thing. Just say ‘ice cream,’ and people are, ‘Aaaaaah,’ ” Perez says. “It’s a happy thing, a happy moment, so we try to do everything in that way—to do something exciting and happy.”
Perez and Orselli—who make 150 to 700 gallons of ice cream a week, depending on the season—find inspiration for flavors from diverse places. For example, the goat-cheese-with-fig ice cream the two are now working on came as a result of the predinner bocado (“a little something to entertain yourself while you wait for dinner”) that Orselli regularly sets out for the family. “For us, putting together an ice cream flavor is like crafting a wine—we look at it that way,” Perez says.
Mora opened its first store in Bellevue Square mall, part of an upscale shopping complex in a Seattle suburb, and last summer added a Bainbridge Island shop near the company’s headquarters and production facility.
Mora’s stores aren’t what you’d expect from an ice cream shop. For starters, instead of the typical coolers with glass windows, the stores have elegant rows of closed, silver-lidded vats. The closed vats are designed to keep the ice cream incredibly fresh by keeping external air out. That doesn’t mean customers don’t linger in front of the counter. It just means they linger in front of the counter to sample the wares as servers lift and close the metal lids one by one. Perez and Orselli believe that people should be able to take their time taste-testing flavors before they choose.
What’s amazing is that Mora ice creams are so flavorful while typically having butterfat of 5.7 to 14 percent. It makes no sense to Perez that an ice cream needs to have more butterfat in order to be “the best.”
“Saying that is like saying that a wine is better, or is super-premium, because it has more alcohol than another wine,” Perez says. Instead of depending on fat for flavor, Mora ice creams depend on better ingredients and recipes to ensure richness and smoothness, he says.
I can attest to that: The flavors burst out of cream that is lovely in the mouth. It isn’t the butterfat content that makes Mora ice cream superlative. It’s the flavor, the texture, the overall experience.
Just one taste of the sabayon (marsala wine and egg custard) ice cream proves that point. The ice cream is complex in flavor, thanks to the marsala, while still having a delightfully full mouth feel. It’s like love for the taste buds.
Across the state in Pullman, Ferdinand’s Ice Cream Shoppe, which dates back to 1948, is stirring things up the old-fashioned way—with incredibly fresh milk straight from the Washington State University dairy.
Another characteristic that makes Ferdinand’s—which is part of the WSU Creamery—unique is the way it processes its ice cream. Artisan ice cream makers often buy their milk, heavy cream and egg yolks already pasteurized, although they might also pasteurize them again just to be safe. Ferdinand’s does all the pasteurizing itself, like larger manufacturers, but employs a “vat pasteurization” process that heats the ice cream for about 30 minutes.
“It’s a pretty long heat treatment compared to what the big commercial ice cream guys would use,” says Russ Salvadalena, WSU Creamery manager, “and I think that heat treatment gives us a kind of homemade flavor, because it kind of caramelizes, or gives it a caramelized taste.”
Like other artisan ice cream makers, Ferdinand’s—which produces about 230 gallons a week—regularly adds and removes flavors from its lineup, though it always has 16 regular flavors in stock. It has hosted ice cream contests to solicit new flavor ideas, one of which, Apple Cup Crisp—vanilla ice cream with green apple flavoring, applesauce and crushed oatmeal cookies—was so popular it became a year-round offering.
Ferdinand’s ice cream has a very rich mouth feel, and yet it has only 12 percent butterfat. The lovely feeling could come from the freshness of the milk, though Salvadalena believes it’s a result of prudent processing. “What can really damage your ice cream is temperature abuse,” he says, “and we do a really good job of keeping the temperature stable.”
Once the ice cream is mixed and air is incorporated, the ice cream needs to be frozen as soon as possible, he says, and once ice cream melts and refreezes, it loses some of that smoothness, getting icy and crystallized. Ice crystals, he says, are a defect in ice cream.
Not only does Ferdinand’s work hard to provide ice cream that is quite smooth and creamy, it doesn’t skimp on the add-ins. The cookies-and-cream flavor is crowded with big chunks of Oreos. The chocolate in the chocolate–peanut butter is smooth around dense, luscious peanut butter. Even University of Washington fans may find themselves cheering for these flavors.
Like the other artisan ice cream makers, Charlie Beaton, owner of Big Dipper Ice Cream in Missoula, Montana, experiments with flavors all the time, which means there’s always something new in his store.
Beaton also works with local chefs and has made spumonis, mango-habañero sorbet and even a curry ice cream for restaurants. And yet, it’s vanilla bean that is Beaton’s favorite.
“That’s how you can tell if someone has a good ice cream—is their vanilla—because it all starts out with what you’re using for vanilla,” he says.
Big Dipper’s vanilla is made from bourbon-Indonesian vanilla. Not only does it taste good, it looks good: Big Dipper’s vanilla is liberally freckled with vanilla-bean specks.
Still, experimenting with flavors is much of what Beaton, who opened his shop in 1995, enjoys about ice cream. He likes the trial-and-error and the discoveries of the process. For instance, he recently tried a rose infusion. While he didn’t think the rose flavor worked out as an ice cream, being too delicate to make a statement amid the heavy cream, it was perfect in a sorbet.
Beaton is proud of his product’s relatively high butterfat content—15 percent—but Big Dipper ice creams don’t rely just on luxuriousness for success. The unique flavors—a black tea that exhibits powerful tannins, for example—pair nicely with the richness of the cream. And the Northwest-inspired huckleberry flavor has a sweetness that shines through without being heavy or oppressive.
For Jim Robertson, co-owner with his wife, Lolly, of Prince Pückler’s Gourmet Ice Cream in Eugene, Oregon, the most artisan part of making ice cream isn’t so much experimenting with flavors as with textures. At one time he thought customers wanted uniformity. Then he realized that “abstract ice cream art” was more popular still. “The feedback we got from people was that they could get even distribution of chocolate chips in the grocery store, and the reason they came to us was because it’s not exactly the same as buying it in the grocery store,” he says.
Though the flavors at the ice cream shop rotate among about 80 regulars, there are typically 45 flavors available at any time. Marionberry, huckleberry and blackberry are typical in the summer, pumpkin pie in the winter. The local Lochmead Dairy produces an unflavored 16 percent–butterfat base mix of fresh cream, milk, cane sugar, nonfat milk solids, egg yolk and natural stabilizers for the Robertsons—who started their shop in 1975—and the couple takes it from there.
"We’re a little bit owned by the neighborhood, not vice versa—we’re expected to be there,” says Jim Robertson. That means, of course, that customers recommend flavors, such as the popular Galaxie, made with chocolate malt, cocoa, and white-chocolate and dark-chocolate chips. The ice creamery now carries a black-licorice flavor (although the ice cream color is white), thanks to customer recommendations.
“I view ice cream as a candy bar in water,” Robertson says, “because there’s a lot of water in ice cream, and managing that water is what keeps ice cream from getting too icy or gooey. It’s managing the water and the flavors that creates the magic.”
In Prince Pückler’s case, perhaps “a candy bar in coffee”—make that a mocha latte—is just as apt an analogy. At least, that’s what I concluded after tasting Pückler’s French crush. Coffee beans and chocolate chips abound in the coffee-flavored confection, and the crunch of those beans and chips adds a delightful element to the sweetness of the ice cream.
ROBERTSON AND THE OTHER Northwest ice cream artisans are the kinds of artists everyone wants to be around—people who can make summer appear with the scoop of a flavor, any time. If I had all those dandelions Deskins blew on, I’d wish for ice cream, too. And I’d wish up a gigantic cone filled with fantastic flavors from the ice cream craftspeople in our region. The first scoop: another taste of Toni’s passion fruit. The second and third: Ferdinand’s Apple Cup Crisp and Big Dipper’s huckleberry. The fourth: Prince Pückler’s French crush. The culminating scoop: that Mora Iced Creamery goat-cheese-and-fig concoction, still in the making, that I can’t wait to sample.
Associate editor Julie H. Case treats her taste buds to ice cream as often as possible. The above profiles showcase just a few of the Northwest’s many artisan ice cream makers.
SIDEBAR
Toni Deskins’ Strawberries on Your Horizon Ice Cream (Created in honor of Horizon Air. Tastes best if served immediately.)
- 1 1/3 lbs. fresh organic strawberries
- 3/4 c. superfine sugar
- 2 tbsp. balsamic vinegar (Go for a 12-year; it’s worth it.)
- 2/3 c. very fresh heavy cream (It’s important that the cream be the freshest you can find, or the berry mixture will curdle it.)
- Squeeze of lime juice as needed
- Balsamic reduction. (Pour 1 cup balsamic vinegar into a stainless-steel saucepan. Bring to a boil and then turn to medium heat to reduce until the vinegar has a glazelike consistency. Use at room temperature.)
- Fresh thyme leaves
Hull and wash strawberries. Dry them and put them into a food processor. Start machine and add sugar. Then add balsamic vinegar. Blend to a fine puree. The vinegar will really set off the fruit. Transfer the berry mixture to a bowl and refrigerate for two hours. Squeeze in a little fresh lime juice to taste if the berries aren’t quite ripe enough (key lime is best; it’s a little less acidic). Combine heavy cream with berry mixture. Start ice cream machine. Pour the mixture into the machine. Allow it to churn and chill until it looks like soft whipped cream. Drizzle it with the balsamic reduction, and garnish with a few clean, loose leaves of fresh thyme. Makes about 3 cups.