1.Ice cream is central to my life, personally and professionally. I have grown up with it, yearned for it, celebrated with it, and cried over it the day my triple-dip scoop wobbled and fell from my sugar cone. When I was a kid, my mother would say, "You can't go wrong with ice cream." Decades later, while dining with the retired New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne, I suggested dessert and he replied, "I'd rather go home and eat a bowl of ice cream." Not only did those two titans, Jewish mother and food eminence, endorse ice cream; they also reassured me that eating it obsessively was the right thing to do.
2.The best ice cream in America comes from Bi-Rite Creamery, a storefront in the Mission District of San Francisco. There I stand in line, the most patient of New Yorkers, awaiting my cup of salted caramel, the preeminent flavor of this century. Lines are commonplace at the top scoop shops, the ones where limitless free samples are handed out on silly little plastic spoons. Anticipation makes me giddy, unsteady with desire. I felt the same way when I was a kid at Howard Johnson's, where I always ordered a pistachio cone with chocolate sprinkles—jimmies to some.
Anne Walker, one of the Bi-Rite partners, got the idea for salted-caramel ice cream after visiting Glacier Berthillon in Paris. Berthillon has been around since 1954, long enough to rightfully take credit for almost everything that tastes good cold.
3.Steve Herrell is the godfather of American ice cream. He opened Steve's, outside the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973 and produced the first ultrapremium scoop-shop ice cream by slowing down an old White Mountain ice cream freezer operating in the front of his shop. Herrell is to ice cream what Julia Child was to French cooking and what Alice Waters is to farm-to-table. Considering that Americans like ice cream more than we like cooking or farms, he should be the most beloved of them all.
4.Ben & Jerry's flavors are so overstuffed, they're all pretty much the same. I defy anyone, in a blind tasting, to tell Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream (vanilla ice cream, fudge-covered-waffle-cone pieces, caramel swirl) from Late Night Snack, "inspired by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" (vanilla-bean ice cream, fudge-covered-potato-chip clusters, salty caramel swirl). That doesn't mean Ben & Jerry's is bad. The only bad ice cream arrives on patients' trays in hospitals.
5.The most thrilling ice cream I ever tasted was Häagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate. I bought a pint for a dollar in the early 1970s at a mom-and-pop store near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Yes, I remember where I was when I bought it and where I was when I ate it and how much I paid for it. To understand its impact, you have to understand that the pinnacle of chocolate in those days was the Hershey bar.
6.Ice cream is our most rambunctious food—as well as our quietest. When I was a kid, I chased ice cream trucks, a joy denied children who grow up in New York City. The Mister Softee trucks in this city are immobile, parked on streets. They do not careen around corners at breakneck speed, Pavlovian bells ringing, enticing keyed-up, sugar-starved neighborhood kids to blast through their screen doors, hurdle their front steps, run screaming down the street clutching crumpled dollar bills—quarters in my day—with a dog in pursuit. That is the sound of happiness, one of the limitless joys of ice cream. After the chase comes idyllic silence. Nothing calms a family dog as effectively as a lick from a vanilla cone.
7.Frenzied dashes after Good Humor trucks taught me a vital lesson in life: Boys and girls are not the same. They like Strawberry Shortcake bars. We like Toasted Almond. We were fast. They were slow. It was good to be a boy back then, when girls didn't care much for sports. I hear times have changed, although I still believe, at my age, that I can outrace anyone to an ice cream truck. Ice cream is about dreams and desire, not reality.
8.Vanilla is unsurpassed as a flavor, unless you happen to prefer chocolate. Vanilla is the ultimate partner of butterfat, the two existing in exquisite harmony. Ice cream, technicians say, should be no more than 16 percent butterfat—most brands top out at 14—because fat allegedly interferes with the delivery of flavor. That might be true if you're a white-coated laboratory wimp. I have heard an electrifying rumor that scientists are about to unveil a sixth taste, after salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami, and it's going to be fat. This will only increase the fundamental importance of ice cream.
9.Nothing is as weighty, as profound, or as beloved as chocolate. That might be the first lesson a child learns, a product of homeschooling. Chocolate needs nothing whatsoever, not even blessed butterfat, to deliver its punch. Dark-chocolate sorbet, which is devoid of milk products, is as good as dessert gets. Chocolate ice cream, of course, is sensational. I suggest Emack & Bolio's Serious Chocolate Addiction, Herrell's Chocolate Pudding, and The Bent Spoon's Chocolate Walnut, which reminds me of the wet-walnut sundaes of my childhood.
10.Ice cream is our finest commercial food product, more important than Coca-Cola, which is a brilliant melding of carbonation and globalization. Coke isn't everywhere—not like ice cream, in homes, supermarkets, bodegas, increasingly obtainable in more and more restaurants, for sale in scoop shops dedicated to little else.
11.Restaurant kitchens will one day make the best ice cream. They already make astounding creations from ice cream, and their sorbets are unrivaled blends of fruits, flowers, and herbs, works of genius. At Aquavit in New York City, chef Marcus Jernmark utilizes a Pacojet—a $4,000 kitchen gadget that simplifies the preparation of frozen desserts—to produce cool masterpieces that meld magnificently with savory food. He pairs pickled-carrot sorbet with peekytoe-crab salad, beet sorbet with steak tartare, and—his magnum opus—potato ice cream with Yukon Gold potato chips. The name understates the glory. It's an incomparable mix of potatoes, shaved black truffles, butter, salt, and pepper.
12.Once restaurant pastry chefs realize the power at their command through the exploitation of ice cream, they will rule the culinary world. At Oleana in Cambridge, Maura Kilpatrick has transformed baked Alaska, until now a hoary stuffed shirt of a sweet, into a masterwork of coconut-macaroon cake, toasted-coconut ice cream, and a toasted-meringue topping that resembles a jester's cap. At Del Posto in New York, Brooks Headley takes a swipe of toasted-cashew gelato and tops it with sour-apricot sorbet, microplaned tangerine zest, Maldon sea salt, and extra-virgin olive oil from Sicily.
13.America is mired in a gelato crisis. Our versions of Italian ice cream are too hard, too old, too dull, and too expensive. I went to the kitchen of the Manhattan restaurant Lincoln, where Silvana Vivoli, a gelato maker visiting from Florence, showed me how gelato should taste. At her family business, Vivoli Il Gelato, everything is made in the store and no gelato is kept overnight. Silvana prepared gelato di riso, which consists of milk, cream, sugar, rice, and a pinch of her secret ingredient, salt. Her gelato, soft and creamy, rich but not heavy, is much like rice pudding and a bit like ice cream. It is ethereal. It made me understand why I had lost interest in the versions we sell here.
14.With one exception: The Bent Spoon, in Princeton, New Jersey. This tiny shop with three tables has no reputation whatsoever for making gelato, but I'm pretty certain that's what I had. While I was sampling teensy spoonfuls of the fresh, pure ice cream—that's how it's portrayed—co-owner Gabrielle Carbone came out to talk to me. She called her products "cold, delicious things" that resulted from mismatched ideas and made-up recipes. She uses a gelato machine and serves from a gelato case. To me, it's gelato.
15.Ice cream taught me that all people were different, despite what Thomas Jefferson believed. Some want their ice cream in a cup. Others prefer a cone. When you hold a cone, the ice cream melts into exquisite silkiness before your eyes. Ultimately, the cone is in charge of you, determining how rapidly you must eat. With a cup, the decision is yours. I love ice cream too much to show weaknesses, allow it to control me, which it could easily do. When I have a pint stored away, I feel an irresistible tug. Ice cream is my kryptonite.
16.We are all either pint people or scoop-shop people. You will essentially eat ice cream out of a carton or from a scoop-shop cone or cup, except in July or August, when it's so indispensable you might be inclined to go both ways. I'm a pint person, but I grant that scoop shops fill a crucial role. They are essential to cities like Cambridge that teem with rich college kids who attend MIT and Harvard and require ice cream to cool their feverish brains.
17.Scoop-shop ice cream packs a wallop, with a ton of mouthfeel. It tends to be denser, stickier, and stretchier than the elite packaged products. Simple, melting creaminess is a characteristic of no-additive ice creams such as Häagen-Dazs and a newer operation in the Boston area, Batch. The Batch vanilla bean is a worthy rival to the nearly unmatched vanilla bean from Häagen-Dazs.
18.No packaged ice cream equals Häagen-Dazs. I still feel that way, despite the shock of the company knocking two ounces off its pints a few years ago. Once the brand came into existence, dessert was never the same. My refrigerator wasn't, either. Häagen-Dazs started filling the freezer compartment, shoving out the Birds Eye frozen peas.
19.Few pleasures match that of prying open the cardboard top of a fresh pint that you have kept hidden, like buried treasure. I suspect smokers experience the same rush when they tear open the foil on a new pack of cigarettes. It's like opening a gift, a present to yourself, one you know you're going to love and will not have to return.
20.Because of an unshakable adolescent addiction, I remain irrationally fond of Breyers, although it has been downsized from the lovable half gallon to the annoying one-and-a-half-quart size. Large-format containers of ice cream are invaluable for displaying on tables at birthday parties to assure worried kids that there will be enough for all.
21.Cookies 'n' cream is a failure, the cookies cursed by sogginess. The concept of crunchy sweets in ice cream was thought up by Steve Herrell, who put mix-in stations in his scoop shops. Customers would choose an ice cream, then bits of candy or cookie to add in. Finally, the meticulous fold-in process began. The result was ice cream full of phenomenal crunch. The only noncatastrophic, nonmushy packaged cookies 'n' cream I've found is Häagen-Dazs Spiced Caramel Biscuit.
22.Bless soft-serve. Portions are huge and prices are cheap. It has faded in prestige, but that will change once America starts sponsoring more carnivals and county fairs.
23.Frozen custard is to soft-serve what beluga is to salmon roe, what Wagyu beef is to chuck. When I was a child, no pleasure approached that of a visit to Kohr Bros., a chain of frozen-custard stands. After hearing of a Kohr Bros. shop in a mall outside Boston, I went for a vanilla cone. The first lick transported me. The custard seemed to possess the velvety excess I remembered so well. Then, gloom. The custard had a glossy, unreal surface that refused to melt. It stayed intact, as though covered by a hair net. More than a half hour passed before a drip appeared. I was dumbfounded. Had Kohr Bros. betrayed me, or worse, was this proof that I had been a really dumb kid?
24.Ice cream can save your life. Every afternoon, while serving in Vietnam, I ate a bowl of strawberry ice cream in the mess hall of Camp Davies, on the outskirts of Saigon. The ice cream had no magical properties; it's simply that being in an extremely safe place every day eating ice cream kept me away from more treacherous places where ice cream wasn't available.
25.Of all the Vietnamese-coffee ice cream I've tried recently, the most transcendent is that of Phin & Phebes, an admirable two-woman pint-packing operation in Brooklyn. It's a dream of Saigon.
26.San Francisco is revolutionizing ice cream. The Ice Cream Bar has brilliantly reinvented the banana split. Traditional versions are flawed. Naked bananas, the kind commonly encountered, are too clunky and rarely ripe. Here, the bananas are gilded with a warm brown-sugar crunch, and the combination of boosted banana, hot and cold sauces, and three different ice creams is dramatic.
27.So much depends on the base. That's the milk, sugar, eggs, and cream that are combined to form the foundation of virtually all ice creams. Anne Walker told me ordinary bases cost a quarter of what Bi-Rite is paying for an organic base from Straus Family Creamery, located in Marin County. She said of less expensive bases, perhaps with unnecessary hostility, "They taste like crap."
28.The most fabulous name for an ice cream is Secret Breakfast (corn flakes, bourbon ice cream). It comes from Humphry Slocombe, which is not far from Bi-Rite.
29.Albert Straus is doing his part to better ice cream. The Straus Family Creamery base is about small-batch production and milk from local Jersey and Holstein cows. I asked him for a favor, to make me a sample of ice cream out of pure base, adding nothing else. Fresh from an ice cream machine, it was very sweet and slightly eggy, with a hint of cooked milk. I could have finished a couple of bowls. Straus and I have a little in common: He's been known to eat ice cream for breakfast.
30.Then again, maybe the secret to great ice cream is liquid nitrogen. That's the basis for what's made at Smitten Ice Cream in San Francisco. If the process proves commercially viable, Smitten could replace Bi-Rite as the best ice cream of all. A lot depends on a cockamamy machine named Kelvin, a patented contraption that consists of a mixer, a tank of liquid nitrogen, a bowl, and a few other gadgets. Each serving at Smitten is churned as the customer stands by. The boiling liquid nitrogen envelops the surrounding air in fog, and the dense, creamy ice cream that results combines the freshness of gelato with the butterfat content of ice cream. "We do everything ice cream companies can't do," said Robyn Sue Fisher, the company's founder.
31.Carvel's Brown Bonnet, a chocolate-dipped soft-serve cone, has a tragic flaw. When you order one, the cone is upended in a small vat of warm chocolate sauce. Magically, the ice cream remains attached. As soon as the cone is turned upright, the chocolate shell hardens. It's superb, but too much chocolate is left behind. Here's a way to get more: Switch to a cup. In this format, the sauce is ladled on. The flood of warm chocolate is never ending. That which doesn't harden on the ice cream falls to the bottom of the cup, to be eaten at your leisure. That breakthrough made me realize that sometimes all I want from ice cream is as much as I can get.
Alan Richman for Details Magazine
