The New Ice Age
Pastry chefs and entrepreneurs are rushing to appease Americans' inflamed appetite for new twists on an old favorite, both in restaurants and in creative retail operations.
Meryle Evans reports.
When San Francisco pastry chefs Ruthie Planas and Eric Shelton worked together at Aqua, romance bloomed at the ice cream freezer. Eventually they left their restaurant jobs, married, and two years ago opened Sketch Ice Cream in Berkeley, named to convey the notion that the purest form of an idea begins with a sketch—in their case, ice cream freshly made each morning. "Pure" and "fresh" are the mantras for a whole new crop of fervent frozen dessert artisans, whether they are pastry chefs experimenting with outrageous flavors, organic dairy farmers making 16 percent butterfat maple walnut ice cream, or entrepreneurs providing restaurants and retail customers with dense, low-fat, Italian-style gelati and sorbetti. They speak enthusiastically about milk from grass-fed cows, day-old farm fresh eggs, stabilizer-free homemade ice cream bases, and splendid ingredients like California's Lagier Ranch almonds, berries from Remlinger Farms in Carnation, Washington, or 61 percent Guittard chocolate.
"People are paying attention to ice cream now," says Emily Luchetti, executive pastry chef at Farallon in San Francisco, whose just-released book, A Passion for Ice Cream, includes recipes from simple French vanilla to tour-de-force almond croquant napoleons with red wine–roasted strawberries and almond ice cream. "Ice cream always used to be a side thing," Luchetti observes, "but the quality—the texture, the intensity—has improved so much that a whole dish can revolve around it."
Restaurant chefs are churning everything that grows, swims, or grazes around the globe. Over a century ago, renowned Del monico's chef Charles Ranhofer in his monumental cookbook The Epicurean published recipes for truffle, asparagus, and brown bread ice creams, but he would have been astounded by the hundreds of off-beat flavors on menus today. At RM Seafood at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, chef Rick Moonen offers a tasting of 16 savory flavors including white truffle, uni, salsa cruda, and lobster roe. The condiment shelf furnishes mustard for pastry chef Sam Mason's ice cream served with braised pineapple and coconut foam at WD-50 in Lower Manhattan, and is also a component in a savory ice served by executive chef/co-founder David Myers at Sona in Los Angeles, combined with shiso, white beer, fennel, and parsnip. Even Iberian ham surfaced recently in an appetizer ice cream with bread crust, tomato seeds, and olive oil made by visiting Spanish chef Francis Paniego for a Rioja wine dinner at WD-50. Pastry chef Caryn Stabinsky at Urena, New York City's latest Nuevo Spanish outpost, uses ice cream as one of six or seven components in dessert ensembles like "Breakfast" with wheat toast cake, fresh feta cheese, maple caramel, rosemary oil, and rosemary ice cream, and "Chocolate and Beet," featuring red beet panna cotta, chocolate sauce, chocolate cookie, beet chip, orange salt, and sour cream ice cream. Updated ethnic inspirations include Indian kulfi. At Dévi in New York City, pastry chef Surbhi Sahni serves pistachio kulfi in a star anise scented citrus soup. Vietnamese coffee, cardamom, roasted banana, and pineapple/star anise ice creams are among the Asian accents on pastry chef Michele Fadden's menu at Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Massachusetts. At Rosa Mexicano restaurants in New York City and Washington, D.C., corporate pastry chef Nancy Kershner offers a rotating selection of eight flavors, including coffee/Kahlúa and peanut crunch, and then pulls out all the stops each June at their Festival de Helados y Nieves (Festival of Ice Creams and Sorbets), with specialties like coconut/guajillo chile and cinnamon/plantain/chocolate swirl.
Trendy Treats As much as everybody loves ice cream, add-on bedizenments and clever promotions sell even more. Here are some recent bell ringers. "It happened mostly on Sunday nights," says executive pastry chef Emily Luchetti at Farallon in San Francisco. "People would come in and order a bowl of vanilla ice cream, which is pretty depressing for a pastry chef who has been working hard on a dessert menu all week. So we took matters into our own hands and put a sundae on the Sunday menu—something light, like roasted strawberries and candied almonds, or chocolate caramel." The result? Ninety-five percent of the people who ordered vanilla for $2 would go for the higher priced $9 sundae. When Christine Law was pastry chef at San Francisco's Postrio, she initiated summertime Thursday evening Ice Cream Socials, an entire menu of frozen desserts, including make-your-own-sundaes. To sweeten the deal, a portion of the sales benefit the Edgewood Center for Children. Grown-Up Liqueur Sundaes are a coup for Manhattan's Chemist Club Grill, where chef John Kaunus combines house-turned gelato with liqueur-laced sauces like bittersweet Valrhona with Godiva and blood orange with Grand Marnier. The appropriately named Alchemist is a simple syrup infused with nine different liqueurs to nap Tahitian vanilla gelato. Given good reasons, ice cream enthusiasts direct their feet toward Ritz-Carlton properties: in Philadelphia last year an ice cream sommelier dispensed customized frozen treats (guests could mix and match flavors and toppings) in the Rotunda on Tuesday afternoons. In Greensboro, Georgia, a poolside ice cream parlor lures swimmers with cups and cones and all the toppings at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge Reynolds Plantation, and Jer-ne the restaurant at The Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey in Los Angeles serves a dessert of six hand-rolled mini cones filled with flavors from ginger to boysenberry to tofu-ti set with a flourish in a rack on the table. To delight youngsters and their parents, an Ice Cream Man wheels his cart to guest rooms at The Four Seasons Hotel Chicago, scooping cups topped with everything from gummy bears to freshly whipped cream. Just for kids? No, the Ice Cream Man is also available for corporate meeting breaks. —M.E. |
Herb and flower gardens also inspire many pastry chefs. Growing up in the Midwest on rich homemade ice cream, Jennifer James, chef/owner of Graze in Albuquerque, still uses a tabletop Cuisinart to make fennel ice cream to scoop on warm apple tarts. Executive chef/co-owner Cindy Wolf of Charleston restaurant in Baltimore picks fresh rosemary from her garden for ice cream served with warm apple fritters and tops blackberry cobbler with lavender honey ice cream. Joe Murphy, corporate pastry chef for Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurants, tosses herbs into a variety of ice creams, among them rosemary with honey roasted pear and basil served with roasted rhubarb and elder flower gelée.
The siren call of ice cream has enticed several pastry chefs to abandon restaurant kitchens to work full-time with frozen assets, taking aim at the finest local ingredients. As far as flavors go, Murphy points out that "restaurants are very different from ice cream parlors, where no one wants the beet ice cream with arugula sorbet. I would be more concerned with getting the best organic products, churned daily for the best texture. And at the end of the day, there's still nothing like a great scoop of vanilla."
That's the philosophy at Sketch. "We've done some pretty obscure flavors," Shelton admits, "but we don't want to turn people off." In a Carpigiani machine imported from Italy, using Marin County's Straus Family Creamery milk, the Sheltons turn out a voluptuous assortment of flavors, among them Medjool date, roasted fig, and burnt caramel with a sharp, smoky edge, yuzu sherbet, almond milk granita, and satsuma/tangerine sorbet, all served in cups or homemade semicrisp crêpes that substitute for cones.
Now there's a new kid on the block in Berkeley, Mary Canales, for the past nine years pastry chef at Chez Panisse, who left the restaurant this spring to open Ici with business partner Erik Anderson, a graphic designer. It's a short geographical jump but a big career leap and a ton of new responsibilities for Canales: flying to New York to purchase equipment from the century-old American firm Emery Thompson, dealing with stiff dairy board regulations, figuring costs when organic eggs run $4 a dozen, engineering a menu of embellishments for the ice cream and layered bombes made in her collection of molds, including dessert tarts, candies, and cookies. Hardly surprising for a Chez Panisse alum, educating schoolchildren about the mysteries of ice cream making also ranks high on Canales' things-to-do list. "Ice cream is fun," she says, "but the issues are serious. For me, it's all about good ingredients." Both Ici and Sketch are primarily take-out venues, but for pastry chef Christine Law, who created a highly successful Ice Cream Social program while at Postrio in San Francisco, there won't be any lounging lickers at her new venture, Sundae Best, a strictly wholesale operation that makes organic ice cream for Bay Area restaurants.
The Emperor of Ice Cream Back in 1954 Stephen Bruce, along with two original partners, founded Serendipity 3, an ice cream parlor/eccentric cafe cum social institution on Manhattan's stylish Upper East Side. Its enduring appeal to children of all ages, the famous and the nameless, is credited to its indestructible sense of fun, whimsical Tiffany shaded boutique, the owner's extravagant showmanship, and patrons' cosmic scream for ice cream. As always, frosty concoctions are deliriously over the top, the portions eye-popping: ice cream fatly sandwiched between waffles or rice crispy treats; sundaes drenched in fabulous hot fudge sauce, coffee syrup, rivers of caramel, maple walnut, or "Mississippi Mud." Don't expect the banana to be split; instead find two bananas and serial scoops of ice cream adrip with gooey chocolate, caramel, and strawberry sauces, towering out of an oversized goblet. (The Coward's Portion Banana Split shows rare restraint: one split banana and three whopping scoops of ice cream.) Its excess to the nth degree, calories-be-damned attitude keeps piling them in till 2 a.m. on Saturdays. Recipes and building instructions are available in Bruce's new Serendipity Sundaes, with photos good enough to eat by Liz Steger. —BEVERLY STEPHEN |
Ice cream has also lured a bevy of environmentally alert young entrepreneurs to both wholesale and retail operations. Some have caught the gelato fever, spread by Jon Snyder, who, after a trip to Italy at age 19, created the phenomenally successful Ciao Bella in 1984 and currently presides over Il Laboratorio de Gelato on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where the latest round of flavors include lager, Guinness, nutmeg, cherry blossom, and wasabi. An Italian vacation also turned into a gelato epiphany for Stephanie and John Reitano, who returned to Philadelphia determined to bring gelato to their hometown. Four years later their shop, Capogiro (Italian for "swooning because something is so good"), with a roster of 250 rotating flavors such as honeysuckle gelato and cactus pear and persimmon sorbetti, has done so well that they have opened a second location and are selling pints at gourmet markets along the East Coast.
Other success stories abound. Juggling dual careers—attending law school while operating a gelateria—Matt Durkovich has won plaudits in Santa Fe for the saffron/honey, strawberry/habañero, and chocolate/Cabernet gelati served at his Ecco Espresso & Gelato. Torrance Kopfer departed Wall Street three years ago to squeeze fresh lemons and peel melons for gelato at Cold Fusion in Newport, Rhode Island. In season he tantalizes tourists and locals with a selection of over 60 flavors like jasmine flower and Mirabelle plum, and in winter he shuts the shop to concentrate on a wholesale business supplying area restaurants. "I like doing interesting things with chefs," says Kopfer, who has come up with flavors such as chocolate/curry and pistachio/cardamom, that he has later sold at the shop.
Kopfer's move from New York to Newport was far less daunting than that of Jerry Perez and his wife, Ana Orselli, who relocated to Seattle from Buenos Aires with their two young daughters four years ago to launch Mora Iced Creamery, recreating the ambience of the ice cream parlors integral to social life in Argentina, where a large percentage of the population is of Italian descent. Using local Smith Brothers Farm milk, the Perezes make four variations of dulce de leche (with almonds, walnuts, shaved chocolate, or swirled) and other Old World favorites in a small factory on Bainbridge Island, then transport the ice cream by truck to the mainland shop in Bellevue Square and to a newly opened Mora (Italian for "blackberry") on the island. The Italian accent is evident in flavors like crema rusa (Moscato wine with walnuts), zabaglione, mascarpone, tiramisù, and marrons glacés. Rose on Valentine's Day and Irish Coffee on St. Patrick's Day commemorate the holidays, while raspberry mousse and strawberry cream signal summer.
Waving the flag for New Jersey farmers is the mission of husband-and-wife team Matt Errico and Gabrielle Carbone, who opened The Bent Spoon on Palmer Square in Princeton two years ago. They have developed such a close relationship with their suppliers, Carbone says, that, "When someone comes into our store and asks about a flavor, not only do we know everything that's in it, but sometimes I can point to my farmer friend and say, 'Guess what—he grew it.' " They post pictures of farms and of the chickens that lay organic eggs and source other local products, such as organic hops and beer from a local brew pub. With the abundance of available fruits and vegetables, Carbone has developed 326 (and counting) variations on an ice cream cone, among them dozens of strawberry combinations from sorbet with black sesame seeds to a "Cosmopolitan" with Cointreau. "For me," she concludes, "it comes down to being a taste of this place. I'm thinking of putting up a sign that says 'New Jersey terroir.' "
