Lick Me Everywhere

Boston, eh? Professional Forays #15 (J.P. Licks) and #16 (Christina's)

2011-04-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

The weekend of April 8-10, I was lucky enough to cover the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, MA (read my report-back for Ms. here), and took that opportunity to sample a couple of Boston's more reputable ice cream joints. In case you had trouble interpreting that first sentence, let me spell it out for you: The weekend of April 8-10, I used the NCMR as an elaborate, foxy ruse to sample a couple of Boston's more reputable ice cream joints.

Boston's ice cream parlors are myriad and mythic: Gourmet magazine recorded eight noteworthy parlors, and it should be noted that one of my NYC favorites, Emack and Bolio's, got its start here too. Bostonians' appetite for ice cream is also the stuff of legend; a food writer friend of mine, Indrani Sen, has attempted to explain why residents of this wretchedly cold New England city eat more ice cream per capita than anywhere else, and could only conclude that the city's high student population ensures a plentiful supply of young people looking for a cheap date locale. NB: Ben and Jerry reached the same conclusion.

First stop was J.P. Licks, since it was around the corner from the Thai place where my best friend Katie and I had dinner. Spring was still in previews, but despite the 40-degree-weather, students were lined up for their cones. Many of them did in fact appear to be on dates, and I was briefly reminded how much of my college-era courtship revolved around ice cream. None of that ended particularly well, but I refrained from telling the young lovers that.

J.P. Licks does a lot of community work, which is commendable, but the ice cream - I got Oreo cookie dough and mint oreo - was merely okay. It was very creamy, but as I've whined before, creamy at the expense of flavorful. I should probably give ice cream a handicap since it's clear I prefer gelato to old-fashioned ice cream, but I can't believe that it's impossible to make rich, creamy, American-style ice cream that's also flavorful. I don't see why a high butterfat content should preclude a strong, clear flavor, unless that's chemically impossible (chemists, feel free to weigh in.)

Happy face!

The following night Katie and I walked over to Christina's, in Inman Square, where I also picked up a fabulous little vintage black dress. Christina's is Katie's favorite, and had also been recommended to me by several trusted sources. I sampled their famous Burnt Sugar, which was nice - like a sophisticated, not-as-sweet caramel flavor - and the carrot cake, which did nothing for me (I'd rather eat a real piece of carrot cake.) Far more impressive was the magisterial malted vanilla, a very malty, very vanilla-y flavor that I could honestly eat until I turned comatose. I also got Mexican chocolate, which could have been more chocolate-y, upon reflection (it was very Mexican, in the sense that the cinnamon was prominent), and coffee Oreo, an oft-overlooked combination if there ever was one.

Empty bowl --> sad face.

While the flavors - especially that malted vanilla - won me over, the texture left something to be desired. It was slightly aerated, as though their freezing machine was faulty or they'd used some fillers or stabilizers that prevented it from being as dense and pure as one (me) would have wanted. I don't know what's stopping them from going all-out on perfection. It could be the jack of all trades, master of none phenomenon: does offering fifty flavors make it impossible to give each one the attention it deserves?

The overwhelming selection at Christina's.

J.P. Licks, 1312 Mass Ave, 617 - 492 - 1001, open Monday-Friday 6am - midnight, Saturday-Sunday 8am - midnight, for more locations, click here.

Christina's, 1255 Cambridge St, (617) 492-7021

Bye bye, Blue Marble, Hello Steve's

2011-03-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

The Village Voice's Fork in the Road food blog (lots of fun, highly recommended) had a piece today on a soon-to-be-opened and highly-anticipated (in this camp) ice cream shop at the former site of what I thought was the none-too-spectacular Blue Marble ice cream shop.

Steve's

Steve's is from Boston, but its new outpost will feature lots of Brooklyn-y products:

If ice cream can be said to have a terroir, the new Steve's is definitely that of Brooklyn. The company, which began developing and testing new flavors last year, is creating partnerships with a number of the borough's artisanal producers: to date, Salvatore Bklyn is supplying the ricotta in Steve's strawberry ricotta ice cream, Kombucha Brooklyn's eponymous brew is the base for a kombucha sorbet, and Plowshares coffee stars in a coffee-cinnamon ice cream. Taza, a chocolate company based in Somerville, MA, is also supplying chocolate for both flavors and toppings; its chocolate-covered cacao nibs appear in Steve's dairy-free mint-cacao chip.

I cannot wait for this wretched weather to disappear so I can throw on a sundress, flip flops and bike on over to Steve's. You can get it by the pint but what fun is that? Not fun. Will definitely let you know what I find.

Breast milk ice cream + bioethics

2011-03-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

When the breast milk ice cream story broke, at least half a dozen thoughtful friends sent me links about, urging me to blog it. I would, I thought, eventually, but the more I considered it, the more I realized it was more than a gimmick. To me, it raised a number of disturbing sociological questions -- questions about adventure eating/foodie elitism, what it means that only a woman can provide this ingredient, what it means that it's for sale, what it means for infants, and the choices mothers make. I didn't want to blog about it merely to say "it exists."

Luckily, Sarah Hepola, a great editor at Salon.com, assigned me what became this piece on "The Squirmy Ethics of Breast Milk Ice Cream." In it, I discuss how a commercial market for human milk might impact women and what its relationship might be to other industries based on the commodification of intimate functions: surrogacy, sex work, the organ trade. Hope you enjoy.

Where does "brain freeze" come from? Or, why we get ice cream headaches.

2011-02-21T19:24:00.000-08:00

A site called io9 explains that brain freeze is an evolutionary tactic.

Blood rushing through the extremities cools down, and when it comes back to the body, it cools the rest of the system. The body has negotiate a way to keep blood flowing to the fingers, toes, and nose, while protecting itself.

....

Ice cream headaches don't usually happen in cold weather, but they are bound up with the body's response to it. When people eat ice cream, it chills the area around the head, and the blood vessels constrict. This constriction is painful - it's the same thing that causes intense and debilitating migraines.

But fear not:

It doesn't do damage and lasts only a few minutes. Still, people don't like discomfort with their desserts, and they've found a few ways to avoid it. One is to, yes, eat more slowly.

I always know it's &%$#@!ing cold out when I laugh and get brain freeze from the cold touching my teeth. It's about that temperature right now in New York. And speaking of laughing, you know what is really not funny? The whole Gaddafi family and how they are massacring their own citizens.

Warning: the Kellog's Ice Cream Sandwich Pop Tart is not an ice cream sandwich

2011-02-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

Image from The Impulsive Buy

That takes some chutzpah, doesn't it? Calling yourself a "rainbow cookie ice cream sandwich" and harkening back to Ye Olde "Ice Cream Shoppe" when in fact you are nothing but a hot, toasty Pop Tart? At first I got terribly excited. Finally! Someone has taken Pop Tarts and married them with ice cream. This long-overdue marriage has been consummated.

But before I could load Freshdirect.com to try and order them, I discovered the truth. They are just an ice cream sandwich-flavored Pop Tart. What a letdown. Also - what a dumb concept. An ice cream sandwich is a form, or a method, of delivering ice cream. It is not actually a flavor. In fact, they come in many flavors, as the guys over at Melt Bakery could attest. According to the review on The Impulsive Buy, they taste more like cake. Sad. An excerpt from the review:

Obviously Kellogg’s can’t put actual ice cream inside their Pop-Tarts, yet have set themselves the task of making the brand taste as much like ice cream as possible, so I was curious about how they’d accomplish this. The answer, it turns out, is “just cram a whole mess of frosting up in there.” It really tastes more like marshmallow or cake frosting than ice cream, which is not such a bad thing. The rainbow sprinkles further put me in the mindset of cake, to the point where “Ye Olde Birth-day Cake” would probably be a more accurate brand name than “Ice Cream Shoppe.”

"Obviously"? Why is it so obvious that Kellogg's can't put actual ice cream inside their Pop Tarts? Why don't they put some actual ice cream in their Pop Tarts and then sell them in the freezer aisle? Kellogg's execs, if you're reading this, you can thank me later, with cases and cases of free Pop Tarts ice cream sandwiches.

Image from The Impulsive Buy

Tomorrow is International Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day

2011-02-04T14:11:00.000-08:00

I just found out about this holiday: International Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day. I think the title explains a lot. Please observe it - if you check the blog, you can find different places that are celebrating. Here's a little about the history of the holiday, which began in 1997. Molly Moon's, a homemade ice cream shop in Seattle, is offering fresh waffles or hot oatmeal with scoops of ice cream.

Meanwhile, there is a REVOLUTION GOING ON IN EGYPT AND I CAN'T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.

The Lick Me Everywhere Stimulus Plan

2011-01-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Last night's SOTU was not only kind of a snooze, it also missed the mark. America doesn't need another Sputnik moment. It needs more ice cream shops - ice cream shops that sell delicious flavors like Gingerbread Crumble, Burnt Cinnamon and Brown Sugar Oats and Walnut. Ice cream shops that buy from local farmers, that employ local people, and that use American-made equipment. That is how we will win the future!

That's the message I took from Kendra Baker and Zach Davis, the founders of the Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, who sat with Michelle Obama at the SOTU address last night. Here's their sweet little video, in which they thanked the politicians who made their $250,000 loan possible by voting for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

So I say, more artisanal ice cream shops, less defense spending. I wonder if I could get elected on this platform.

Top Chef: Just Desserts finalist joins LA Creamery

2011-01-25T18:39:00.000-08:00

She looks nice. Photo courtesy of LA Eater.

LA Eater reports that chef Danielle Keene is joining the artisan ice cream shop LA Creamery as Corporate Pastry Chef. Here are some of the new flavors allegedly in the works:

Hot Chocolate flavored with chili powder, cinnamon, vanilla bean and cocoa nibs; Milk Chocolate Chai flavored with black tea and seven spices; Sassafras flavored with sassafras bark; Honeycomb ice cream layered with handmade honeycomb seafoam candy; Roasted Banana made with fresh bananas roasted with brown sugar and butter until caramelized, then blended in a lightly flavored rum base; and a non dairy Chocolate Sorbet made with bittersweet chocolate, sugar and water.

None of those strike me as too original but the Milk Chocolate Chai could be interesting. Speaking of which, here's a link to my world-famous chai recipe and an accompanying article on Poetry of Food.

Cold Stone Creamery = Fancy Ice Cream?

2011-01-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what his go-to ice cream is, but Dow Jones newswriter Al Lewis sure threw me a curveball when it turned out the "fancy" ice cream he describes in a recent article was actually Cold Stone Creamery. By "fancy," does he mean "expensive"? Or "overpriced"? Or maybe "gross"? According to Lewis' article, Cold Stone's sales grew over 20% from 2005 to 2007, but then plunged over 11% in 2008. The president of Cold Stone, Dan Beem, onto a bus, and hit 16 cities in an effort to figure out how to keep the franchises profitable in a dismal economy. A few of the solutions they've hit on:

"Next month, Cold Stone is rolling out warm treats to counter the cold weather: brownies, churros and funnel cakes. Come Spring, it will add yogurt to compete with the frozen-yogurt craze that Pinkberry has re-ignited."

The "Cheesecake Fantasy" Signature Creation from Cold Stone Creamery

It's not clear whether or not any of those execs tasted the ice cream. If so, they might have figured out why sales are dropping.

Incidentally, Cold Stone, which bills itself as "the ultimate ice cream experience," was the subject of a recent nightmare had by a friend of mine. After he awoke sweaty and trembling (ok, I made that part up), he wrote me to say: As in real life, it's a cavernous nightmare of overpriced ice cream -- people mashing ghastly things like cookie dough and tomatoes into boysenberry sherbert, that sort of thing. Dream-Me was so revolted by the whole spectacle that I just stole as much cookie dough as I could and then got kicked out of the shop.

I shared my own experience with Cold Stone, whose ice cream I found to be heavy, too sweet and pretty tasteless:

The last (and only) time I went to Coldstone Creamery was in 2003 when I was an intern at Vogue. It had just opened, and CN had just moved to Times Square, and all the girls were talking about incessantly. I suggested to the other interns that we go after work one day, a suggestion greeted with open horror because (I had forgotten) never would any of them have permitted something so caloric within two hundred feet of their starved, sad little bodies. I convinced one reasonable colleague to accompany me, at least, and I ordered some abomination that, since you mentioned it, probably included cookie dough. I did not steal it. I do remember it being overpriced.

The worst part about this whole excursion was that, unlike your dream, it really happened.

Anyone out there have a Cold Stone experience, real or imagined, delicious or dreadful, to share?

Pint-sized Haagen Dazs pints

2011-01-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

The Daily News reports today that as commodities prices rise, food companies are shrinking package sizes. Not like the smaller cap on Poland Spring bottles that saves plastic, but actually quantitatively less food. Small children in America already grow up with our confusing non-metric, or customary, measurement system, and now to confuse them further, a gallon is 59 ounces, according to Tropicana, and a pint is 14 ounces, if you trust Haagen Dazs. I never trusted them much to begin with.

Monaster News, via the Daily News

Best lead sentence of the year, so far

2011-01-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

From the Bellingham Herald, a newspaper in Washington. Oh boy.

"Despite temperatures below freezing Sunday night, Jan. 2, a hungry man stole an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen and scarfed it down, according to police."

I really love "...and scarfed it down, according to police." I wonder if "scarfed" was the word used in the police report.

Adam S. Wilgus, 24, the culprit, later told officers "he didn't have enough money to pay for the cake and was hungry. He also told officers he had eaten the cake while he was driving and had thrown the box out the window..."

The story continues:

"The 10-inch, round cake, which was worth about $24, was chocolate and vanilla with fudge and cookie crumbles on the inside, said the Dairy Queen's area supervisor and former cake manager, Amanda Armstrong."

Wilgus, whose last known address was in Blaine, was booked into Whatcom County Jail for investigation of theft and an unrelated warrant for disorderly conduct."

He's behind bars. You are safe. For now.

Two of my favorite things, together: David Hasselhoff + ice cream

2011-01-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

Photo by ICON/Fame pictures, courtesy of Celebrity Smack Blog (whatever that is)

Some things were destined to be together, and David Hasselhoff + ice cream promotion are certainly two phenomena that fit together so naturally that one wonders why this didn't happen, say, 20 years earlier when he was actually on TV.

For me, he was more of a draw before he went gray and when he looked like he could truly save me if I was to start drowning. Now he looks like one of those grandpas who's gearing up for a 5K but will probably not make it past 50 meters.

Always and forever The Hoff.

That said, he clearly has not lost his touch with the ladies, or at least the Australian ladies. Or at least the Australian ladies who dressed up in red swimsuits to impersonate Baywatch lifeguards for the sake of promoting a mass-produced "tangy fruit product" (ask Unilever about that one) called "Splice."

Anorexic model tasted ice cream before she died

2011-01-03T09:35:00.000-08:00


From her blog

Last night my mom told me about a news story from last week that I had missed, about the death of Isabelle Caro, a French fashion model who struggled with anorexia from her earliest days. It was a very, very sad story to begin with, but what truly touched me, and not simply because I'm obsessed with ice cream, is that according to the New York Times obituary, she wrote on her blog:

“I still eat almost nothing, but I’ve stopped vomiting,” she said after her photo shoot for Nolita. “I have started to distinguish tastes of things. I have tried ice cream — it’s delicious.”

This comment reminded me, in some strange way, of the two people who held hands before they jumped out of the burning World Trade Center building. A small human gesture to which we can all relate, against a background of something much larger and much less comprehensible.

I looked on her blog and couldn't find that entry, but it did make me think about the way certain foods serve different intellectual/physical roles. Ice cream, to an anorexic, is absolutely forbidden. It is decadent, full of sugar and fat, one of the world's most popular treats, never to be savored. And in denying one's self that luxury, the anorexic can find a deeply satisfying sense of power. Curious how I know these things? I used to have my own issues. I never had enough discipline to be anorexic but like a lot of young women growing up surrounded by fashion magazines etc I also associated my self-worth with my appearance. It's still not easy to enjoy ice cream 100% without any guilt, but luckily I'm pretty active and try and ride my bike places and not eat too much other junk food. Anyway, my condolences to Ms. Caro's family.

Update: It is winter. That means chestnut ice cream at Grom.

2011-01-03T09:22:00.000-08:00

It is winter. There was a blizzard. Michael Bloomberg did not handle it well.

That is the bad news.

The good news is that Grom's marron glacé flavor is back. It is best paired with the regular chocolate ice cream (not the dark chocolate sorbet; that flavor is for masochists and sophisticates). Also be sure to ask for the chestnut flavor first because whichever flavor you request first they will give you a bigger scoop of that one.

Iran penetrates the Green Zone...with ice cream

2010-12-29T08:53:00.000-08:00

Credit: Liz Sly, Washington Post

Liz Sly, formerly of the Chicago Tribune and now with the Washington Post, did a fun little story last week about IcePack, an Iranian ice cream chain making headway in Iraq - in the Green Zone, no less. I'm not sure that a few ice cream stores, albeit ones from a chain that claims to "exalt the name of Iran and reinforce Iranian Identity", truly represent a big Iranian challenge to America. Wasn't there some kerfuffle about a nuclear program? Or something?

My other issue with this story is that I don't see a single description of the ice cream's taste or quality. I don't even know whether this is soft-serve or scooped! Nor can this information be garnered with certainty from Icepack's throwback website, where the four specialties on offer are named the "Multi Fruit", "Multi Mix", "Ice Pack" and "Special Ice Pack". They are largely distinguishable in the photos by the fact that they come in different styles of paper cup.

Still, it's good to know Iraq is gaining enough relative security that people can go out and enjoy ice cream. This is a recurrent trope in the works of a few other contemporary writers on Iraq, such as the feminist scholar Nadje Al-Ali and the blogger Salam Pax, who often mention Iraqis going out for evening ice creams as a sign of normalcy and peace.

Professional Foray #14: DC does gelato, and how: Dolcezza, Dupont Circle

2010-12-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

DC does a few things right. Museums. Air quality. Indian food, namely at Rasika, where I had quite possibly the best Indian meal I've ever had. Chinese food, humor and politics are not its strengths.

Gelato, it turns out, is. Dolcezza, of which there are three locations in the DC area, is some of the finest gelato I've tasted in America, on a par with Grom or Cones. The location near Dupont is clean, mostly white, intimate and rustic, like the sophisticated little cafes that dot the historical town centers of the wealthy cities in northern Italy. It's owned by an Argentine woman, Violetta Edelman, and her husband Rob Duncan, who source everything from local farmers. You can read their Michael Pollan-esque odes to their farmer friends on their website. Almost everyone gets described as "some of the nicest folks we know."

Irrespective of how kind the farmers are, and how much Violetta and Rob adore them, this is some spanking good gelato. My friend Liz and I had the ginger cardamom pistachio, the pumpkin spice (with nutmet, allspice, clove, cinnamon and ginger), and the chocolate with ancho, chipotle and cinnamon. The pistachio flavor was particularly unique, reminiscent of mann w' salwa, a cardamom-pistachio flavor I'd heretofore only eaten in the Middle East, where that combination is used often in nougat candies. As in most cases, the addition of ginger made it even more delicious. The pumpkin flavor features locally-grown Crookneck pumpkins, a sweet variety of squash they bake with spices before folding it into cream sourced from a Pennsylvania dairy.

I'm nearing my wit's end with the preciousness of local this and small farmer that (even though I prefer to shop, eat and generally live that way, I'm tired of talking and reading about it all the time), so I won't dwell further on how great all of these efforts are. The important thing is taste, and this gelato tastes wonderful. It's creamy and light on the tongue, goes down easy, and you don't need to drink a lot of water while you eat it, which is how you know if it's too rich or heavy. I was able to go to dinner a half-hour later, and eat another giant Indian meal. And if Dolcezza wasn't closed by the time we finished, I would have had another cone. Dolcezza, 1705 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC, 202 299 9116, www.dolcezzagelato.com

Professional Foray #13: Sorry Grom (and sorry readers), I'm back - with a new NYC favorite, Maialino

2010-11-22T16:53:00.000-08:00

Photo by Kelly O'Connor from Maialino's Facebook page

Readers, if there are still any of you left, I'm sorry. I've neglected you (but not ice cream) for a long time.

However, someone has brought me back into the fold. And her name is Jennifer Shelbo, pastry chef at Maialino.

Friends, this is the best gelato in New York. Not only is the texture perfect - and I mean spot-on, no margin of error, to the .0001% perfect - her flavors are wildly good. It's creamy, but light on the tongue and melts instantly in the mouth, bum-rushing the palate. After a very, very good meal (and a wonderful evening at the theater - run, don't walk to catch Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in "Driving Miss Daisy") I had the bruschetta di canella (Italian for "cinnamon toast"), chocolate, and almond straciatella. The cinnamon is a pale, delicately flavored cinnamon gelato with crunchy bits of cinnamon-y cracker-y stuff on top, like the topping on a great muffin, sprinkled on the gelato. The almond was amaretto flavored, with wisps of great dark chocolate woven through. The chocolate was complex and richly flavored without being heavy, dense or overwhelming. Because of its effortless texture, it went down easy.

Contrast this with, for example, the chocolate at Grom, previously my contender for best New York gelato. I don't know if I should admit this but the last time I had a taster of the dark chocolate, I puckered my mouth and said "I'm just not strong enough for that." See, I don't want to move into a mindset where the gelato and I become adversaries. No, I'd rather the gelato to be my intimate confidante. And at Maialino, I think I've found my new best friend.

More medicated ice cream...this time with weed

2010-09-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

You know what I always say - "Ice cream. Good for what ails you." Are you getting older? Try anti-aging ice cream. Recovering from chemotherapy? Ice cream. Perhaps you're afflicted with the ailment of not being stoned? Let's review the options...there's...oh hey! Look at that! Ice cream. Creme de Canna, which also makes a small selection of cookies in flavors like chewy molasses and chocolate chip, has a line of gourmet ice creams in Bananas Foster, TripLe Fudge Brownie and Straw Mari Cheesecake. Each pint is $15 and "contains 2-4 doses."

Healthzone.ca reported:
"It's made with organic local strawberries and a Grand Marnier reduction,” says Jonathan Kolodinski, owner of the licensed dispensary.

Um, and drugs, buddy!

The article also notes that the ice cream is "available only to card-carrying medical-marijuana users." Uh-huh. They're not passing the spoon.

Ice cream treats cancer! Maybe!

2010-09-24T05:22:00.000-07:00

I just came across this old article from a March issue of The Scientist. The writer Katherine Bagley describes an effort by scientists to isolate milk proteins that can help patients recovering from chemotherapy and insert them directly into...strawberry ice cream. Yes.

She writes:

"One protein in particular, lactoferrin, has been shown to inhibit tumor growth, promote intestinal cell growth, and regulate immune response in the intestine (Biochem Cell Biol, 89:95–102, 2002). The scientists reasoned it could therefore help patients receiving chemotherapy, which can damage normal cells that multiply quickly, such as infection-fighting white blood cells, known as neutrophils, and intestinal cells."

One of the doctors involved explains why ice cream was the most suitable delivery mechanism for lactoferrin:

"Palmano considered incorporating the bioactives into a liquid drink or yogurt, but in the end, ice cream won out. “Creating a frozen product meant we didn’t have to worry about the bioactives’ shelf life,” she says. “Plus, people going through chemotherapy typically lose their appetite. Why not give them a treat like ice cream?""

While it's not yet on the market, it is being tested by patients who are "required" to eat ice cream every day:

"The scientists worked with New Zealand’s top ice cream manufacturers to create six tons of strawberry-flavored ReCharge. They then made a placebo ice cream with the same taste, color, and calorie count. ReCharge started its Phase II clinical trial in October 2009, in which 200 prechemotherapy cancer patients will be required to eat 100 grams of either ReCharge or the placebo ice cream each day.
“It has been a wonderful ride creating this product,” says Geursen. “We don’t know if ReCharge will work—it is always a challenge going from mice to humans—but we are keeping our fingers crossed.”"

I just raised the question in a previous post about anti-aging ice cream, why not deliver vitamins via ice cream? This is an entirely feasible and worthy undertaking. Maybe I should petition Solgar and Grom to do a collaboration.

Read more: Sweet relief - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/3/1/24/1/#ixzz10RtLlYQn

Brainfreeze does not cause long-term brain damage

2010-09-24T05:08:00.000-07:00


Getty Images

Did you really think it did? I've never heard that before. Luckily a writer at Popular Science has cleared all of this up for us with this helpful post, in which he first describes the two theories of how and why one gets brainfreeze (or an "ice-cream headache"):

"First, let’s get one thing straight. “This condition is referred to as an ‘ice-cream headache,’ ” says Stacey Gray, a sinus surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. “It’s a very technical term.” Although there’s no published paper saying as much, a milkshake slurped too quickly probably does not actually lower brain temperature. Besides, Gray says, the temporary pain can’t do any harm because it has nothing to do with the brain.

There are two schools of thought on what causes the ice-cream headache. The drink may chill the air in your sinuses and cause the blood vessels in the nasal cavity near your forehead to constrict, creating pain similar to a migraine. Or perhaps it touches off a branch of the trigeminal nerve in your mouth, triggering a pain response in the nerve that’s responsible for facial sensation."

Later he quotes a doctor explaining why lowering brain temperature temporarily is not a big deal:

"“Even if the patient wasn’t anesthetized, at that temperature they would be in a noninteractive state, unable to sense stimuli or produce a response,” Tamargo says. “But once you warm the brain up, it picks right up from where it left off. It’s not harmful at all.” So whether your brain is frozen or not, if you can handle a little pain, slurp away."

Have you ever heard of this before? Long-term brain damage? Seriously?

To anyone who thought Unilever was not intent on world domination: anti-aging ice cream

2010-09-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

Unilever, the biggest ice cream manufacturer in the world (so I guess it doesn't need to intend to dominate the world; it already does), makes Ben and Jerry's, Magnum, Cornetto, and is sold in more than 40 countries. As if this wasn't world-dominate-y enough already, they're also planning to research anti-aging ice cream. It will apparently contain anti-oxidants. Ampere Life Sciences, based in San Jose, California, will carry out the research over a period of five years, Fox reports.

I don't know how a few anti-oxidants are going to mitigate the effects of all the sugar and fat that make your skin age and give you heart disease, but it seems they know the answers. Speaking of which, why haven't they fortified ice cream with vitamins yet? Why do cereals come fortified, but not ice cream? Why shouldn't I have ice cream with vitamins for breakfast? I demand answers.

Professional Foray #12, Cones gelato, Bleecker St, NY

2010-09-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

Happy news, dear readers! I'm moving into the Bermuda Triangle of gelato - the rocky zone bordered by Bleecker Street, Carmine Street and 7th Avenue South, home to no less than three of New York's top gelaterie (Grom, l'Arte del Gelato and Cones) and one of my favorite Italian ice shops (Rocco's pasticceria). Luckily I've got a fifth-floor walk-up, so hopefully the running up and down the stairs a few times a day will balance out the ice creams I'm sure I will eat a few times a day. As a friend who knows me too well asked, when I told him where I was moving: "looks cute. is the kitchen going to be big enough for you, or do you plan to cycle through the ice cream shops for your daily nutrition?"

On that note, I headed to Cones with my wonderful friend/real estate broker Adam, to sample their wares for the first time in a decade. Cones opened when I was in high school, and it was the first gourmet gelato shop in the neighborhood. There was Moondog further north on Bleecker, and Bleecker St. Pastry and Rocco's selling icies, but there was nothing like this before - soft, very sweet and intensely flavored. My best friend at the time, Emma Feigenbaum, fell hard for their Dom Perignon lemon sorbet. She was always a woman of expensive tastes. I liked the almond, if I remember correctly, but I always thought the flavors were a little too sugary, and attributed it to the proprietor's Argentine roots (desserts come very sweet in South America).


Behold the halo of cinnamon

I tasted the almond, for old time's sake, and the corn, of which I had heard legions. I really, really love corn - I can eat about a half-dozen to ten ears in a sitting - and corn + sugar + cream + a sprinkling of cinnamon could only turn out well, my instincts told me. As I tasted and surveyed the lay of the land, indecision settled over me like a cloud. There was also a chocolate flavor with white chocolate chips, and a maté flavor that the scooper told me was similar to green tea. Could I taste just one or two more? No. A firm "no." I had reached the two-taste maximum, and with the owner standing by, there was no bending the iron-clad rule. I stalked the freezer cases, still unsure of what to get.

"If she has this much trouble choosing an ice cream flavor, imagine what she'll be like when it's time to choose an apartment," an older man nearby commented to Adam. We swiftly corrected him, noting that it was taking me about twice as long to select my cone as it had to choose an apartment. In the end, I settled on chocolate with white chocolate snow (little chocolate shavings) and corn, sprinkled with ground cinnamon. The corn was exceptional, delicate and sweet, like a frozen version of atole, the Mexican corn drink made with corn flour, vanilla, milk and cinnamon. The chocolate was less impressive - not dark or chocolate-y enough, and the white chocolate shavings were too small to taste but large enough to make the ice cream texture gritty. Since it's around the corner, expect updates soon. 272 Bleecker Street, 212-414-4795, 1 scoop $4.75, 2 scoops $5.75, 3 scoops $7.

Professional Foray #11, Emack and Bolio's, Houston Street, New York

2010-09-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Zagat's, the Scoop on Cones, and my friend Oscar all think this is some of the best ice cream in New York City. Is it? They definitely have ground-breaking flavors, and for someone whose benchmark is Cookies and Cream, I was delighted to hear from the proprietor that E & B were the first company to put Oreos into ice cream, in 1975. "That's why it's called 'The Original Oreo,'" she explained.

Since 1975, the instinct to throw Oreos into ice cream has gone unrestrained, resulting in such triumphs as peanut butter Oreo, and my favorite, Grasshopper Pie: mint chip ice cream - WITH OREOS. I am so, so grateful to this company for replacing the "or" (as in "mint chip or mint Oreo?") and replacing it with that vastly preferable conjunction, "and." The chocolate is very rich and tasty, as is the Cosmic Crunch - vanilla ice cream, caramel swirl, chocolate chips, walnuts, and cookies. The "Deep Purple" black raspberry flavor is also divine - much more flavorful than the wan, rather artificial stuff I'm used to seeing.

You may have noticed I'm dodging the aforementioned question. It may very well be the best ice cream in New York, and I appreciate that they were using non-hormonally-charged milk way before anyone else, but my book, it's slightly too rich. It is super-premium ice cream, meaning it has a butterfat content of, most likely, above 14% (the International Dairy Foods Association doesn't have specific guidelines on this, but this is commonly accepted), much higher than the 5-8% that's normally found in gelato. And I, my friends, have been eating a lot of gelato lately. When it came time to take charge of my double-scoop cone of Original Oreo and Grasshopper pie, I was barely equipped to handle it.

It was like training for a marathon by running around the Central Park reservoir once a week for a month. I just wasn't ready. My body couldn't take it. The ice cream felt dangerously rich; I could hear it whispering for an angioplasty as it slid down my throat. I needed gulps of water between bites. But that said, it sure tasted great. And I've been back - training, as it were - several more times since then.

NYT spotlights the helados of Buenos Aires

2010-09-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Horacio Paone for the New York Times

Man, I wish I'd gotten to this place before I had to read about it. I've been hearing about Persicco (watch out for the crazy techno runway-show intro) for years, from my friend Massoud, who told me that by running an ice cream blog and not featuring Persicco, I'd "lost the plot already," in his words. Luckily the NYT has thoughtfully found the plot, with a great story about dulce de leche ice cream, in its myriad forms, available in all the grand heladerias of Buenos Aires. In fact, a chain called Chungo's won for best dulce de leche ice cream, not Persicco, but they all sound pretty good to me. How about this one?

"During Freddo’s heyday in the ’80s and ’90s, the company began offering crema tramontana — which contains dulce de leche jam and specks of malted chocolate ball."

Malted milk ball...someone needs to bring that back - and not Ciao Bella, which is straight up disgusting these days.

Update: Corinne Masucci, a BA native, reports that they deliver til midnight. Damn.

Pregnant nuns shill gelato

2010-08-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

The esteemed Daily Mail of London brings us news that Italian gelato company Antonio Federici has offended Catholics by using a pregnant nun, with the tagline "immaculately conceived," as its poster girl. The firm "said the adverts celebrated the ‘implied forbidden Italian temptations’ of the ice cream," according to the article. I can see how this might be offensive to Catholics, several of whom have had trouble resisting the forbidden temptations of, say, young male parishioners.

USA Today names the top 50 ice cream destinations in America

2010-08-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

My best friend Brendan once described USA Today as "an experiment in how much of the news can be expressed as a pie chart." Journalistic quibbles aside, here's their rundown of the best ice cream parlors in America, state-by-state. I'm already skeptical since their California listing forgoes Bi-Rite in favor of, well, who cares? Somewhere else. So that can't be right. How's their list, in your view? Do you spot an error? Is your favorite missing? Do weigh in.

Artisanal ice cream hits South Korea

2010-08-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

I can't say I'm very familiar with the Korea Herald as a news source, but for now I'll trust their ice cream reporting on good faith. According to the paper, a couple of artisanal ice cream parlors have opened recently, including one that's owned and operated by a protege of les deux grands Pierres - Pierre Herme, author of Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme, and Pierre Marcolini, one of Belgium's top chocolatiers. So if you're living in South Korea, life just got a lot better.

Photo: The Korea Herald

If you're fresh out of North Korea, like this preacher guy Jimmy Carter just rescued, life just got a lot better too. If you're still in North Korea, life is most likely terrible - speaking of which, Harper's magazine has some fantastic reportage from there in their July issue.

Blue Marble's flagship will close due to rent hike

2010-08-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

The Brooklyn Paper reports that the flagship location of Blue Marble, the organic, local-dairy, seasonal, yada yada yada ice cream parlor in Boerum Hill in downtown Brooklyn, will close because of a rent hike. I wasn't overwhelmed by the ice cream, but it seemed like a sweet place and it's too bad it will close. The story does a nice job of pointing out how Blue Marble was one of the first businesses to trigger that neighborhood's gentrification, and the irony of its being forced out because of said gentrification.

Why Sicily is the greatest place on earth: The Empire of Ice Cream

2010-08-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

A gorgeous paean to Sicily and its tradition of gelati, by Mary Taylor Simeti, in Saveur.

Christopher Hirsheimer, from Saveur, issue 52

..."Sicilians took their ice cream very seriously, at all levels of society. In northern Italy, ices remained the preserve of the sick or the wealthy until the late 19th century, owing to the cost and limited availability of ice and other ingredients. But in Sicily even peasants considered ices their due. William Irvine, an English gentleman visiting there in the early 1800s, marveled that "wretches whose rags have scarse adhesion enough to hang upon their bodies, yet find a baioc [a coin worth less than a penny] to spend in the ice shop". The lackadaisical Sicilian legislators may have been described as an "ice cream and sorbet parliament" by King Vittorio Amedeo II in the 1700s, but these were men who knew their priorities: when in 1774 Palermo's supply of snow gave out, the parliament dispatched armed dragoons to Etna to procure more. The demand for snow was insatiable. It is said that during a ball given in 1799, likely for the Bourbon king Ferdinand and his wife, Maria Carolina, such a quantity of ices was served that their production required 11,000 pounds of snow."

A review of yesterday's ice cream social at the New Amsterdam Market

2010-08-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

I had to work yesterday, and am furious that I missed the ice cream bonanza at the New Amsterdam Market. Luckily, a writer named Brad Thomas Parsons from Serious Eats had a roundup, with Bent Spoon of Princeton, NJ, coming in #1. Here's his review of Bent Spoon, find the rest here.

Heirloom Tomato-Peach sorbet. Photo by Brad Thomas Parsons via Serious Eats

Featured Flavors: Fresh Ricotta, Bourbon Vanilla Sea Salt Caramel, Nectarine Sorbet
Bonus Flavors: Heirloom Tomato-Peach Sorbet, Concord Grape Sorbet
This wasn't a contest, but The Bent Spoon was the winner for me. From the super-friendly server who enthusiastically described the provenance of the wild grapes used in their sorbet, to their generosity with the samples. (Plus, they brought two bonus flavors.) I was tempted to cash in all of my ice cream tickets just to try them all. The Concord Grape sorbet was bursting with grape flavor and was one of the creamiest fruit ice creams I've ever tasted. And you had to love how they tipped their hat to the tomato tasting with their Heirloom Tomato-Peach sorbet, probably my favorite taste of the day.

Food writers reminisce about ice cream around the world, from Saveur

2010-08-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

Photo: Christopher Hirsheimer, from Saveur edition 52

I just stumbled across this beautiful collection of vignettes from writers around the world, reminiscing about memorable ice cream run-ins. I hope this blog becomes a wider, richer version of this kind of story. Here are two of my favorites - and notice how the second one hints at the historical roots of the relative dearth of good ice cream in the UK, despite its renowned dairy industry.

Mexico: Frozen Dinner
The tropical ice creams of Puebla are so alluring that I once made an entire dinner out of nothing else. The meal began at Tepoznieves, a wildly colorful shop near the main square. My appetizer was fig ice cream dotted with bits of candied fig and spiked with mescal. The main course followed: tequila ice cream—as white as a cloud—with tangy passion fruit ice. The passion fruit was so refreshing that I had to have two more scoops. For dessert, I walked around the corner to La Flor de Michoacan for a Popsicle-like paleta of guanábana, or soursop, which tastes like a highly perfumed blend of apple and pear. Luscious. And for the road? A mango paleta, as nice a nightcap as I have ever had. —Barbara Hansen

England: Postwar Treat
I began eating ice cream in London in 1947. Ice cream distribution had been banned during World War II and for a time afterward, to save fuel, and it was consequently available only at shops where the owners made the ice cream themselves. Although the quality was rather poor, it tasted simply delicious to me. I'd go to such a shop and get a sandwich of two wafers enclosing a slice from a neapolitan brick; it was called a slider, because if you squeezed it too hard the middle would slide right out. The slider evolved from an earlier ice cream called the hokey pokey, a neapolitan slice wrapped in paper. The vendors who sold it were Italian, and they'd cry, "Ecco un poco" (Here is a little)—which, in the Cockney accent of the customers, became "hokey pokey". —Robin Weir

Baskin Robbins India launches Kulfi ice cream for the local market

2010-08-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

Baskin Robbins is offering a kulfi ice cream in India to celebrate its 65th anniversary (as a company, I'm presuming, not as a presence in India). The flavor sounds delicious - it will feature saffron, cardamom and cinnamon. From the photo, it doesn't look like it will resemble a true kulfi, which is made with boiled-down milk and is usually much richer and heavier than normal ice cream, and is often served on a stick in a cone shape. Still, I would eat it.

Obama loves Martha's Vineyard ice cream, reports USA Today

2010-08-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

USA Today - known for their Beltway coverage - reports that Obama is "a big fan" of the ice cream in Martha's Vineyard, according to a White House spokesperson.

A modern-day tragedy, by Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman

2010-08-22T10:38:00.000-07:00


A modern-day tragedy, 2010, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman

Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman is an actor and artist whose sharp eye and deep sense of empathy captured this image and called it out for what it truly is: a modern-day tragedy. The random scattering New York City sidewalk debris echoes the sprinkles caught amidst the vanilla ice cream, and the drip attunes the viewer to the sense of time passing. How long ago was there a screaming, crying toddler standing astride this fallen scoop? Did she or he get another free scoop from a compassionate vendor? One can only hope.

Watermelon Ice Cream Cake - a retro recipe from Big Girls, Small Kitchen

2010-08-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

Like a watermelon, only not.

I have to confess, I'd never heard of watermelon ice cream cake before Cara from Big Girls, Small Kitchen, sent me this recipe. I may have seen (and repressed having seen) them, but from her description, it actually sounds like a good idea. Raspberry sorbet, flecked with chocolate chips, surrounded by pistachio or green-tinged vanilla ice cream - how bad can that be? Check out her easy recipe and gorgeous photography here.

Los Angeles catches on to the ice cream sandwich

2010-08-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

L.A. Weekly rounds up five places doing interesting-sounding ice cream sandwiches. Watch out, Melt Bakery.

Sandwiches from MILK in L.A. Goodness me, those look fantastic.

Village Voice chats with the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck's Doug Quint

2010-08-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a sweet little Q and A with the chef/owner of the Big Gay Ice Cream truck, which apparently pushes its wares on Union Square. I'll be back with a professional foray soon!

Pus in your ice cream, from John Robbins

2010-08-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

John Robbins, the only son of Baskin-Robbins founder Irvine Robbins, had a piece in the Huffington Post this week about Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormones (rBGH) showing up in ice cream. Ben and Jerry's has pledged not to use rBGH-tainted milk in their products, and Robbins calls on other companies to do the same:

Ben & Jerry's gets all their milk from dairies that have pledged not to inject their cows with genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Why, then, can't Haagen Dazs, Breyers and Baskin-Robbins do the same?
Starbucks now guarantees that all their milk, cream and other dairy products are rBGH-free. So do Yoplait and Dannon yogurts, Tillamook cheese, Chipotle restaurants, and many others. But ice cream giants Haagen Dazs, Breyers and Baskin-Robbins continue to use milk from cows injected with rBGH, a hormone that's been banned in Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Australia and all 27 nations of the European Union. As if to add insult to injury, Haagen Dazs and Breyers have the audacity to tell us, right on the label, that their ice cream is " All Natural."

Later he quotes a veterinarian who has some disturbing news about rBGH's effects on white blood cell count:

Does the increase in udder infections have an effect on the milk, and thus any ice cream, cheese or other product made from it? Most definitely, according to Dr. Richard Burroughs, a veterinarian deeply familiar with rBGH. "It results in an increase of white blood cells," he says, "which means there's pus in the milk!" The antibiotic use, he adds, "leaves residues in the milk. It's all very serious."

A sick cow

At the end of the article, he highlights a "Take Back Our Ice Cream" campaign from the Oregon chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility and urges readers to get engaged by contacting companies to demand they use hormone-free dairy products.

Proustian moment #5, regarding my late father, the wonderful Gerald Sussman

2010-08-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

I emailed my Uncle Harvey to tell him about the blog, and this is what he sent:

"Here's a true ice cream story from your own dad:

Gerald was at a party talking to some guy. The topic was
the best ice cream each guy had in his life. Each said his was
for sure the best there is.

Turns out they both attributed the best ice cream to the
dairy school at University of Wisconsin in Madison. Gerald had
some when he visited me.

You need to take a field trip there. The ag students make it and
they sell it at a student run store at edge of campus.

Any serious ice cream blogger knows this.

Not crazy about blog name (call me old fashioned)."

Blast from the Past: Golden Gaytime ice cream video via HuffPo

2010-08-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

Huffington Post links to a hilarious advertisment for Golden Gaytime ice cream pops, described on the company's official website as a "combination of toffee and vanilla-flavoured centre, dipped in a scrumptious choc coating and covered in crunchy biscuit pieces."

Professional Foray #10, Melt Bakery

2010-08-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

As a day camper at Mount Tom, I remember eating ice cream sandwiches on days when we weren't lucky enough to get Toasted Almond bars or even Strawberry Shortcake bars. They consisted of two slightly salty, cake-like chocolate wafers with slimy vanilla ice cream in between, and the whole thing was the size and shape of a mid-1990s cellphone. A thin sticky residue usually coated the paper wrappers.

Blech.

I never understood why an idea with such powerful potential - cookies + ice cream in one portable package - fell victim to such abominable execution. There were other attempts over the years: the Chipwich sandwich, the Klondike/Oreo sandwich, but no one was really putting their back into it.

Until my new favorite people Kareem and Julian came along. They co-founded Melt Bakery, which specializes in the best ice cream sandwiches I've ever tasted. Kareem is a bespectacled, food-loving Lebanese entrepreneur, and Julian is the guy in the kitchen, formerly of Lever House. They work every weekend at the Hester Street market, which is a collection of antique vendors and food stalls in a park in the Seward Park housing projects. It doesn't sound like a promising locale, and on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I wasn't quite sure if ice cream was the thing, but Kareem's smiling face (and the ice cream sandwiches he handed me) put my doubts to bed.

He first offered me the Cinnamax, cinnamon ice cream between two snickerdoodles. I adore any and all things cinnamon, and Julian makes his ice cream with both ground cinnamon and by steeping his custard with whole cinnamon sticks. The cookies were your standard butter cookies with cinnamon and sugar on top, but the ice cream was very, very, intensely cinnamony. Each bite was like a concentrated, elegant bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. My only criticism, which Kareem took like a man, was that I prefer a more generous amount of ice cream with respect to how thick the cookies were. In other words, the ice cream should play a starring role, with the cookies functioning as back-up. There may be protest coming from some quarters (I haven't yet had this debate with Julian, the chef), but this is, after all, an ice cream blog, written by an ice cream lover.

Next came the Cocoa Daddy, salted caramel ice cream sandwiched between two Valrhona-laced brownies. I had seen this matchup online, and it sounded like it could go one of two ways: nauseatingly rich and sweet, or luxurious and indulgent. Guess which way it went? Yes. Two for two, boys! The salt kept the caramel ice cream from wandering off into overly-sweet dulce de leche territory, and lovely bittersweet shards of chocolate punctuated the brownies.

Kareem and me

Lastly (for this week, at least), I tried their marquis sandwich, the Belle - peach ice cream between two slender discs of brown butter bourbon shortbread. Julian uses white peaches from the greenmarket, and roasts them to bring out their flavor. The cookies were very, very rich, and again I'd prefer a bit more ice cream to cookie, but this was a very unique, and very luscious combination. It was faintly hedonistic, something a wealthy family from Savannah, Georgia might serve at an afternoon luncheon.

Well done, Julian and Kareem. Looking forward to trying more.

Professional Foray #9, Alphabet Scoop

2010-08-17T17:52:00.000-07:00

Several friends who have lived in the East Village, apprised of my blog, have oriented me in the direction of Alphabet Scoop. It sounds like my dream come true: ice cream as income-generating tool for kids from underserved communities. Their motto is "Changing lives, one scoop at a time." Or three scoops at a time, if you're me.

Their website describes the project:

"Alphabet Scoop is a homemade ice cream store that trains and employs youth in the life and job skills that will allow them to advance in their school and work endeavors. Teenagers receive classroom instruction and work under a mentor/manager, someone who oversees the operation of the shift and mentors the teen."

So that's the good news. The other good news is that there are free unlimited sprinkles (chocolate and rainbow), exceptionally nice people behind the counter, one of whom bent the rules and squeezed three flavors into a regular-sized cones (love that), and it's late on weekends, til 11 on Saturday.

The bad news is the ice cream. I had chocolate peanut butter, chocolate chip cookie dough, and cookies and cream. While the flavors were all right, the texture was off. It never quite melted; I could tell that, given enough time, this ice cream could end up like a supermarket brand my best friend Katie once bought for a dinner party in Berlin. While she insisted she loved its fluffy, mousse-like texture, I pointed out that the morning after the party, it still had not melted entirely. It was in some kind of state of suspension, a limbo born of too many stabilizers, and not enough dairy. Remember dairy?

Alphabet Scoop's ice cream bore that same mark of uncertain melting capacity. My friend Greg and I had walked all the way to Second Avenue from Avenue B, where the store is located, and bumped into a friend and talked for twenty minutes before we sat down in a park where I could finish my ice cream. And still, it wasn't melted.

My advice to the lovely, lovely folks who work there: skip the stabilizers, or the milk powder, or the corn syrup, or whatever funny stuff is going into your ice creams, and get back to the basics. Your concept is FABULOUS and I would support you in a heartbeat if I could stomach more of your product. $2.25 for a small, $3.75 for a regular (2 scoops).543 East 11th Street, New York 10009, between Avenues A and B, 212-982-1422, http://www.fathersheartnyc.com/programs-alphabetscoop.php

Dispatches from the Frontline #4, Scoopless in Shanghai

2010-08-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

Scoopless in Shanghai, by Mona, LME East Asia correspondent

Upon hearing that I was moving to China for the summer, various well-traveled friends of mine assured me that I would just LOVE Shanghai, because...well..."it's just so cosmopolitan!" And that's proven to be true. I do love Shanghai. A city that boasts a wealth of international cuisines, cultures and communities which most other Chinese cities lack.

Shanghai skyline

One of the most unique and admirable aspects I have come to appreciate about Shanghai is the juxtaposition in the built environment of old and new. Swaths of the cityscape are construed solely for the tourist's gaze, decorated with ginormous glass towers, sweeping broad avenues, high-end restaurants and manicured gardens. However, at the street level, the accessible world of older, low density neighborhoods characterized by networks of pedestrian-friendly alleyways continue to maintain spaces for small markets, food stalls and local community life in the center of the city. Anyone who has spent time in Paris, Dubai, or New York knows that this is a rarity in the average tourist-destination metropolis.

Of course, no one is sure how long this will last, as capital-hungry developers continuously work to transform every "available" inch of the city into a demolition and soon to be construction site.

Demolition and high-rises

Tianzifang alleyway = consumer's delight

Then there are the spaces of the city that are somewhere in the middle: the gentrified and refurbished old alleyways where developers have transformed Shanghai's older neighborhoods into vibrant tourist destinations. Tianzifang is a perfect example of one of these spaces, and from the point of view of an ex-patriot tourist I have to say the appeal is obvious.

I mean, by now aren't we all completely sick of navigating mall escalators shoved into glass box buildings the size of a city block? Who wouldn't prefer to shop in a charming maze of narrow, walkable alleys, packed to the brim with small boutiques that offer everything from clothes, music and hand-made jewelry to books, photographic prints and of course FOOD?

Last week, I set out to Tianzifang with a (by now) obvious priority: to seek out a delicious and if possible local ice cream experience. I figured this would be a good place to look because Tianzifang A) mostly caters to an international crowd of tourists, and B) isn't a mall in the strict sense and thus has no Haagen Dazs around to shut out smaller vendors.

Online research proved promising, pointing me towards Bing - a small stall tucked deep in the alleys and offering Teppanyaki-style sorbet. I'd never heard of the Japanese sensation before, but it sounds absolutely delightful: "First, pick your choice of fresh fruits or other zesty flavors, such as champagne, mint, green tea, red pepper, yogurt, basil and yak cheese. Then, Bing blends your selection with water, syrup and milk, and stirs the mixture on a -20C freezing iron griddle. And ta-da, a fresh delightful frozen treat is served."

Teppanyaki - source: shanghaidaily.com

Ta-da indeed! Ice cream fresh off a frozen griddle? Wow. I was psyched to say the least, and all set to order up some basil, mint and yogurt sorbet. You can only imagine my disappointment to learn after about half an hour of winding through the alleyways that the world wide web had steered me wrong. Bing no longer exists in Tianzifang, and Shanghai for all I can tell. Now in its place stands a silly second-hand CD shop. Tragic.

Palace desserts, apparently all the rage

But I wasn't ready to give up my mission, determined to find what I had come after. Just around the corner, I spotted a popular looking hole in the wall called "Palace Dessert" and decided to investigate. After consulting with the signage and the woman at the counter, I determined that on offer here was a uniquely Chinese dessert of "milk, sugar and rice wine" that had its roots in the supposed genius of a Qing Dynasty chef of the legendary Forbidden City.

I asked if there was a frozen version of the dessert, and the woman helping me pointed to one menu selection saying (and I quote) "it's just like ice cream." I immediately forked over the 9RMB ($1.30) for a small cup, eager to try the stuff but worried that this sounded too good to be true.

Serving up ice cream, Forbidden City-style

And it was. I had been led astray yet again. This was NOT ice cream, or anything like it. Sure, it was dairy-based and cold, but the tartness of the wine completely cancelled out any hint of anticipated sweetness or creaminess. After a few bites, I threw in my spoon with curiosity fulfilled but tummy unsatisfied.

No, in fact, this is not just like ice cre

As a final resort, I turned to gelato. I know it isn't a particularly Asian specialty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was the closet thing I could expect to a sure bet. The challenge in Tianzifang was finding a gelato vendor that was selling goods that didn't look like they were containers oozing with high-fructose corn syrup and artificial color.

It wasn't until after dinner that I had my eureka moment. Origin, a spacious and yummy California-esque restaurant serving "seasonal fresh cuisine" on the edge of Tianzifang happens to have a delicious-looking display of normal-colored gelato attached to the restaurant. After the long afternoon of hunting, the sun had gone down, my feet were aching, and one fat scoop of gelato in a waffle cone never sounded so good. I tasted the coffee flavor and wasn't impressed. I was pretty baffled when the server used my first tasting spoon for my subsequent sample of lemon, but I was feeling desperate at this point and couldn't walk away.

Last stop, gelato

I went for the lemon - tangy yet refreshing - and I've resolved that the final damage of 22RMB ($3.00) isn't too appalling considering that decent ice cream is such a rare commodity in the Tianzifang marketplace.

This is Mona reporting for Lick Me Everywhere from the streets of Shanghai.

Origin, House 39, Lane 155 JianGuo C. Rd.(near RuiJin Rd.), http://originsh.com/, RESERVATIONS: 646 701 00

The "Worst" Ice Creams in America, via the Daily Beast

2010-08-14T17:41:00.000-07:00

The Daily Beast has a slideshow of 40 dastardly ice cream desserts that run from 880 calories (a Dairy Queen nut and fudge waffle sundae) to 1,900 (Baskin Robbins' Fudge Brownie 31 Below dessert). Most of the offenders are, predictably, from the likes of Carvel, Friendly's, Dairy Queen, Cold Stone Creamery and Baskin Robbins. Most of them also contain mix-ins like peanut butter, fudge, Oreos, brownies and chocolate chip cookies. Most of them also sound distressingly good.

The article inspired an incisive comment on mix-ins, posted on Gawker:

"I can't eat ice cream at a Cold Stone Creamery. I just don't get it. Why the hell do I need gummy bears and Apple Jacks chopped into my ice cream? It's ludicrous. People who frequent shopping malls love this place. They're all in there, waiting in line to say, "I'll have the Cherry Do-Wop, Pillsbury Crescent Roll, Cinnamon, Cookie Crisp Delight, with extra Booberry chunks please." And I'm like, "You fucking sugar monsters. What the ever loving kidney failure are you doing here? Just raid a supermarket and poise your jiggle-butts under a Dominos sugar two ton feed bag. And die quietly."


A day's worth of calories. Yum!

Ice cream news round-up, week of August 14th

2010-08-14T16:32:00.000-07:00

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is after Ben and Jerry's for its deceptive mislabeling of products containing high-fructose corn syrup and other funky ingredients as "all-natural."

Don't you wish anything at all would happen in San Francisco? Until then, the SF Chronicle will run stories by staff writers on Ghirardelli's ice cream parlor.

John McCain and Jan Brewer ate some ice cream yesterday and then made empty campaign promises.

Ice cream sales remain strong (4% growth in the retail sector) in the Middle East. There are some great sub-heads in this article, such as "Preference for traditional desserts set to constrain ice cream growth in Iran" and "Demographics and high temperatures save ice cream's performance in Saudi Arabia."

There's an ice cream-themed spa in the Mall of America. Sounds dumb.

Tomorrow night, the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck and Humphrey Slocombe are doing an event in SF. Now that's news, Chronicle! Are you paying attention?

Katy Perry and Baskin-Robbins are promoting her new album, "Down Under," by offering free cotton-candy ice cream on August 27th, also known as Katy Perry Day. Just go in to a shop and mention her name, if you actually want cotton-candy ice cream.

The Kitchn had this popular post on making ice cream without a machine, HuffPo details six more ways, including using liquid nitrogen.

A Texan supermarket employee hit by a falling half-gallon of ice cream sues the store for damages for medical care and expenses, physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, physical impairment, loss of earning capacity, loss of body member, disfigurement, fear of future disease or condition, cost of medical monitoring and prevention, exemplary damages, interest and court costs.

Professional Foray #8, Mia Dona gelato cart, East Midtown, NY

2010-08-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

After reading about the cart a few weeks ago on Daily Candy, I've been looking for an afternoon window in which to go check out Mia Dona's ice cream cart. According to this posting on the Midtown Lunch blog, Dona is serving "the best takeaway dessert in the area." And Serious Eats NY's Kathy Chan liked it well enough.


Credit: Kathy Chan

Kathy wrote that, seeing her torn between the two flavors, honey-ricotta and pistachio, the obliging man working the cart was kind enough to offer her two flavors in her brioche. This is the least he could do, seeing as each sandwich is $6. When my friend Maisie and I sidled up to the shop, at quarter of 7 p.m., the cart was already parked in the back of the restaurant by the toilets, and we had to order from the manager. He wasn't familiar with the two-scoop, bulging brioche policy, and gave us each a stale, toasted brioche schmeared with a thin layer of our respective choices. I've eaten bagels buttered more generously than this brioche.

When I cut each one in half so Maisie and I could try each others', it barely squished out of the sides. This was a far cry from the oozing, bulging, lick-it-before-it-drips-down-your-hand glory of La Sorbetteria in Bologna (more to come on that soon), where Maisie and I first bonded as juniors studying abroad. Not a promising start.

The gelato, as you may be able to tell from the picture, is rather icy. The flavors are decent, sweet and clear (as you may know from reading this blog, I'm not entirely averse to iciness in an ice cream or gelato, but in this case it felt stingy and compromising), but nothing special. The honey drizzled on top of the ricotta was a nice touch, but the brioche was well past its prime, and didn't soak up the ice cream in the way that makes a brioche ice cream sandwich such a win-win proposition.

When the manager came out and saw eight shards of half-eaten brioche on our plates, he solicited our opinions. We shrugged and politely mumbled some sentence fragments. "A little icy." "Brioche kind of stale." "Usually there's more." He very kindly offered them on the house, acknowledging that we hadn't truly enjoyed them, and therefore shouldn't have to pay for them. He also predicted that Friday, yesterday, would be the cart's final day, so let this post serve as a eulogy. $6, Mia Dona, 206 East 58th St, 212-750-8170, www.miadona.com

Professional Foray #7, People's Pops and Mercer's Dairy, Highline, NY

2010-08-14T12:25:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday night, my friend Valentina and I went for a walk on the High Line, something I never get tired of doing. L'Arte del Gelato (full review to come) has been replaced by People's Pops as one of the High Line's rotating cast of concessions, and although I'd just polished off an Ultimate Summer Cooler before we set off on our walk, I forced myself to have a pop, after having a bite of Valentina's watermelon-and-cucumber flavor.

Forced is probably the wrong word. The pop was sweet and refreshing; like the watermelon Frozfruit pops I used to get if my mom caught me trying to sneak a creamy strawberry or coconut one (which are technically ice cream, not a *healthy* fruity snack), but these were more delicate, and without the black seeds that Frozfruit used to throw in their either for street cred or because they were too lazy to remove them. There wasn't too much cucumber going on, but the watermelon flavor was sweet and clear. Valentina thought there was no sugar added; I thought there was. This, readers, I promise to clarify when I go behind-the-scenes at the People's Pops operation one day soon. My friend, the food writer and fellow Brown alum Nathalie Jordi, will be back soon from a holiday and hopefully I can get some backstage access. At the very least, I'll get an answer on the sugar content. $3.50 per pop, High Line concession stand, also available at Chelsea Market and at weekend markets, check www.peoplespops.com for info)

After a quick up-and-back on the High Line, we descended back down to reality on Gansevoort Street, where a big green ice cream truck lurked in the shadows, lying in wait for me like some kind of crafty jungle cat. It pounced; I succumbed.

The ice cream was from Mercer's Dairy, which, as far as I can tell is a mediocre outfit based in upstate New York. Some of it was supposed to be organic, although one of the flavors I had, black raspberry, is not listed as an organic option on their website. All of the flavors were just all right: the vanilla, fine, the chocolate, embarrassingly lacking in flavor, and the black raspberry, tasty. The texture was a little foamy and not as dense as I'd prefer, but not icy either (which I do prefer). All in all, not the best $4 I'd ever spent. One thing I do love about them: these old school cartons.

The black raspberry was good, I guess.

Upcoming ice cream events: Austin, TX, Brooklyn, NY and South Street Seaport, NY

2010-08-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

My sources in Austin, TX, tell me that this Saturday from 10-7 brings a mighty, mighty Ice Cream Festival in Waterloo Park. The $5 admission fee goes to children's charities, among others, and the weekend includes a homemade ice cream contest (just dangle that in front of me, why don't you, when I have to work that day), and an ice cream eating contest with someone named Joey Chestnut.


This guy is the champion?

I have seen an eating contest once on TV. It made me never want to eat again. The contestants ate bowls of mayonnaise that they shoveled into their faces with their hands. However, I am older than 18 and I believe I could eat more ice cream than Joey Chestnut in six minutes, and I deeply regret that I am unable to prove this hunch, because I'm nowhere near Austin, TX at the moment. So, Joey, sleep easy tonight; your competition's far away in New York.

Next Sunday, thank heavens, I will get my own mini-festival at the New Amsterdam Market down by the South Street seaport. This description sounds like my dream come true:

"Sunday august 22, 2010
the market is open from 11:00am to 4:00pm

ICE CREAM FAIR AT NEW AMSTERDAM MARKET 12:00PM TO 4:00PM
special tasting tickets $20; proceeds benefit the market

This August 22nd we will celebrate the height of summer with six ice cream and sorbet makers including The Bent Spoon, Roberta's, Early Bird Cookery, Marlow & Daughters, MilkMade Ice Cream, and Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream. These artisans are committed to showcasing regional products and flavors. Each will create up to three unique ice creams and sorbets for the market using only seasonal or responsibly sourced ingredients.

With more than a dozen great flavors available, we know it might be hard to choose just one! You'll of course be able to get a regular cup or cone, but we'll also be selling tickets for an ice cream sampler, which will entitle you to six miniature ice cream cones with the flavors of your choice. Tickets cost $20, with proceeds supporting New Amsterdam Market. On a hot summer day, what better way to benefit the market and highlight the producers and flavors of the region?"

My only complaint is, if they're selling "more than a dozen great flavors", why does my sampler packet only include six tastes? Huh? What about the other six+ that I don't get to taste? Am I supposed to get another packet? These are serious questions and I demand answers from the ice cream community.

Coming up on Monday night is a beer tasting and ice cream social at the Beer Table, in (where else?) Park Slope, Brooklyn. Here's the info:

August 16th
Bent Spoon and Beer Table Ice Cream Social
New Jersey native and Bent Spoon ice cream maker/co-owner Gabrielle Carbone will make her way to Park Slope to co-host the first Beer Table ice cream social! Hailing from Princeton NJ, the Bent Spoon has gotten quite a following thanks to its stellar ice cream and use of seasonal ingredients from the area's farms and producers. Gabrielle and a NJ grower will give a small glimpse into the rich agricultural landscape of the southern Garden State. 4 flavors will be served along with beer pairings.
Tickets: $35. Please e-mail events@beertable.com for tickets.

Professional Foray #6, Lily Lolly, Bryant Park/Soho

2010-08-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

In all honesty, I was favorably disposed towards these ice cream popsicles before I even tasted them. Have a look at the Lily Lolly website, and tell me you don't feel the same.

Lily Lolly is a 1920s flapper character created by Nadia Roden, artist, illustrator, and ice cream perfectionist. She's also the daughter of Claudia Roden, one of the world's experts on Mediterranean food.

Nadia wrote the first-ever book on granita, Granita Magic, but when she decided to start her own food business, she chose to vend creamy popsicles instead, reasoning that she "could be extra creative with lollies," and "do things you can't do in a cup," like roll a white-chocolate-dipped orange cream lolly in finely grated citrus zest mixed with crystalline sugar.

Monday evening found Nadia, her nephew Cesar, and her stepmother Peggy all sporting matching black-and-white aprons (Cesar looked especially fetching in his), selling popsicles to the curious cinemaphiles there to see a screening of the Goodbye Girl. It was hot, sticky and humid, and despite a competing Time Warner-sponsored ice cream truck (and a Ben and Jerry's kiosk on the corner of 42nd and 6th), Nadia was doing a brisk business.

The family + me (Nadia's got her arm around me)

Not only that, but in the few hours I spent hanging around and watching her ply her trade, at least a half-dozen people (women, all) turned up specifically to buy a lolly (or three), then dashed off before the film even started. One group of young women, who had at least two apiece, then announced they were off to dinner, which cracked Peggy up.

At least two pops each. Good on you, ladies!

Why the fuss, the serial buying, the devoted followers? Nadia is a perfectionist: she tinkers with each recipe til she's got it down pat, and takes extra care in using the best ingredients and making sure each recipe is as flavorful as possible. I've had ice cream that stresses how local and organic it is, but somehow the part about flavor/deliciousness gets lost in the mix. Nadia's pistachio rose, for example, my first of three, tasted just like a Lebanese milk pudding, creamy and fragrant with rosewater, chock full of finely chopped Bazzini pistachios. Having just returned from Beirut, I felt I was back in Lebanon again, at the end of a long mezze meal, stuffing myself with a few bites of muhallibiyah before passing out.

As the evening wore on, I met a number of charming, interesting people, all drawn into Nadia's polka-dotted orbit. This lovely woman below, Roxandra Antoniadis, is an art consultant and soon-to-be memoirist, based between New York and Ohio (how often are people based between New York and Ohio?). She was thrilled with her 50s Orange Lolly, and nearly fainted when I mentioned that Nadia is Claudia Roden's daughter.

I also met Pam, a daytime bartender whose best friend from college owns the family farm in San Diego where Nadia gets the oranges for her lollies. She also nearly fainted when she realized the coincidence.

My next lolly was the Fresh Mint flavor, which Nadia makes by steeping fresh mint leaves in the cream and milk. This one was truly exceptional: the mint was so fresh, and so intense, and the texture so light (she says she uses three parts milk to one part cream), that it felt like a small explosion of mint went off in my mouth, its mushroom cloud dissipating and leaving behind chocolate chip detritus in its wake. I wouldn't normally use the word "symphonic" in an ice cream review, but here it seems worth the pretention.

Nadia sent me off with one of her classics, the 50s Orange Lolly. I was skeptical when I heard her describing it as having a sour cream base, because sour cream reminds me of bad Mexican food, or something delicious such as rice pudding that got left out of the fridge too long and turned gross. This, however, was barely sour. It was a creamy, luscious ice cream base whose mild sourness accented the delicate, refined taste of the Valencia oranges that she specially orders from California. It was dipped in white chocolate, and then decorated beautifully with a dusting of superfine zest and sugar. To her tremendous credit, after three ice lollies in a row, I still went home hungry for dinner.

Bespoke ice cream, attempt #1: Molasses gingersnap à la Moondog Ice Cream

2010-08-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

In the "Bespoke ice cream" series, I will chronicle my endeavors to make the world's most delicious (to me) ice cream. I confess that, if given the choice, I will generally err on the side of a lighter, icier ice cream - more milky than creamy, although I do love a kulfi every now and then when the occasion demands it. It may be because I drink such copious amounts of chai that I've grown accustomed to its particular mouthfeel. My chai formula calls for part vanilla soymilk and part whole organic milk- the soymilk lets the spicy flavors come through while the whole milk gives it body.

On my first grocery store run, I came home from Whole Foods with a one-gallon jug of organic whole milk, a few pints of half-and-half, a box of vanilla soymilk, and a few cartons of heavy whipping cream. I was going to make cookies and cream, my go-to flavor, first, so I bought some "natural" Oreo-style cookies, at which point I noticed a bag of "natural" gingersnaps on the shelf. I flashed back to my early teens: long-boarding around Greenwich Village with my best friend Emma, cutting school to eat lobster rolls at Pearl Oyster Bar back when it only had one table and a few seats at the bar, and always, always stopping at Moondog Ice Cream on Bleecker Street for a little taste of their heaven. One particular flavor that has never left me was the molasses gingersnap. So simple, so...outlandishly...good. I realized I hadn't had it in over a decade, whereas my last cookies and cream encounter was probably only hours old. Then I waited 45 minutes to pay for my ingredients, enough time to read all the latest news as well as the most popular news with the NYT iPhone app.

I started with Christopher Kimball's basic two-quart recipe for vanilla from the Dessert Bible (I'm away at a wedding at the moment but I'll post it in full on Sunday night), but substituted one cup of soymilk for one of the cups of milk, and one cup of half-and-half for one of the cups of heavy cream. I also upped the sugar by a tiny bit, which turned out to be a youthful error. After refrigerating the mixture overnight, I poured half of it out into a large Pyrex, reserving the other quart for a cookies and cream adventure.

Into the Pyrex full of creamy vanilla custard base I drizzled organic blackstrap molasses, stirring and stirring til it had the same dark, coffee-colored hue I remembered from Moondog. I also added ground ginger and cinnamon, to make it taste more like a gingersnap cookies. As it churned, I crumbled the gingersnaps into a bowl, added some chopped crystallized ginger (to be safe) and dusted those items with more ground ginger and cinnamon.

I am happy to report that, even though my freezing canister wasn't quite cold enough, and the ice cream never quite froze to real ice cream, the taste is 100% right on, just like a delicious molasses cookie with chunks of chewy gingersnap and even more chunks of bracing candied ginger. Each bite makes me feel 15 again. After a day or two in the freezer, it became real hard ice cream, which I now scoop into organic sugar cones (I know, I know) or, even better, have every morning for breakfast as part of my "Ultimate Summer Cooler": iced chai, sweetened with a jaggery-honey syrup, topped with a few scoops of molasses gingersnap candied ginger ice cream.

FYI: I looked into what became of Moondog and according to a poster on Chowhound, the owner was "considering getting out of the ice cream biz" (is that like "having enough of the gang life"?). I called a number they had listed in Brooklyn and got one of those fast busy signals that means the line is probably no longer working. This is very sad, but I feel tremendously empowered having recreated his ice cream by myself.

My friend Kate enjoys Bespoke ice cream, attempt #1.

Ralph Gardner at the WSJ pays tribute to the Good Humor Toasted Almond Bar

2010-08-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

I have to hand it to the Journal. On the same day that the NYT was offering fancy recipes for homemade ice cream, they ran a paean to the Good Humor Toasted Almond bar by Ralph Gardner Jr, titled "An Unappreciated Culinary Delight":

"No, the reason I love the Toasted Almond Bar is that it's a significantly sophisticated taste experience. I'd go so far as to say that if your server at Jean-Georges or Café Boulud (in all likelihood someone named Kevin) presented you with a Good Humor Toasted Almond Bar you'd think it was the most fabulous thing you'd ever tasted."

This was always my favorite flavor of Good Humor bar too. I went to a day camp for many years and our counselors gave out ice cream at the end of every day; what a good day it was when that ice cream was a toasted almond bar. It was like eating prison fare every day and then all of a sudden having the warden announce that a care package had arrived for me from Danny Meyer. I was never big on regular vanilla ice cream pops coated with waxy chocolate, or ice cream sandwiches, or whatever other junk we were handed on most days.

Just three things I'd like to share with Mr. Gardner: one, there is, of course, a Facebook group for toasted almond bars, should he wish to join. And two, he writes that:

"Of course, not everyone is a fan of almonds. I can live with that. I hate cilantro. But for those who enjoy their ice cream covered in nuts, biting into a Toasted Almond Bar is a mind/body experience. It doesn't just taste great, it makes you feel privileged. Your taste buds congratulate you on your education, whisper into your ear that you possess powers of culinary discernment far beyond those of ordinary pedestrians. I'm not a big wine drinker, but I'm sure connoisseurs feel the same way when they talk about the nose of a classic Bordeaux, with its hints of coffee, rose petals and forest berries.

Your first interaction is with the coarseness of the almonds; so what if they're usually a little soggy: I can live with that. Then you experience creamy ice cream."

The ice cream, unfortunately, is not exactly "covered in nuts," and the coarseness you're encountering is not quite due to almonds. In their ingredient list, Good Humor calls that crunchy topping "Cake Crunch" and, while the very last ingredient is almonds, there are a few other goodies that precede the nuts.

INGREDIENTS: ICE CREAM: NONFAT MILK, SUGAR, MILKFAT, CORN SYRUP, WHEY, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES, CELLULOSE GUM, GUAR GUM, POLYSORBATE 65 AND 80, CARRAGEENAN, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL FLAVORS. ALMOND FLAVORED CORE: WATER, CORN SYRUP, NONFAT MILK, SUGAR, WHEY, MILKFAT, GUAR GUM, MODIFIED CELLULOSE, LOCUST BEAN GUM, NATURAL FLAVOR, ANNATTO (FOR COLOR), CARAMEL COLOR. COATING: CAKE CRUNCH (SUGAR, CORN FLOUR, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL [COTTONSEED, PALM AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL], WATER, CARAMEL COLOR, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS), SOYBEAN OIL, PALM OIL, ALMONDS.

Thirdly, he writes:
"The Toasted Almond Bar's innermost layer has a yellowish hue. But to be honest I've never been able to tell whether that's just an aesthetic choice on Good Humor's part or if it actually contributes to the great almond taste."

The "great almond taste" is probably coming from some great "natural flavors." That would be my guess. Probably not from the "locust bean gum."

This is not to dismiss the thrust of his initial proposition: that these are, indisputably, one of the all-time greatest of trashy indulgences. And I loved the sociological analysis (these bars are largely the province of an older clientele, according to his shoe-leather reporting in and around Central Park). Great piece, much appreciated.

Attention, ladies: It's JUST A MOVIE (plus review of San Crispino gelato, Rome)

2010-08-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

I repeat, this is a MOVIE. Make-believe! Credit: Rex Features

Remember the Sex and the City tour that shepherded out-of-towners around New York to various sites featured on the show, including a pit stop at Magnolia Bakery where participants downed cupcakes in emulation of the show's characters? In case you don't, here is A.A. Gill's brutal description of it in Vanity Fair. As if that wasn't sad, and strange, enough, a new manifestation of this phenomenon has taken hold in Rome.

The Telegraph reports that women hoping to emulate Julia Roberts' character in Eat, Pray, Love are lining up to buy gelato at San Crispino, a gelateria near the Trevi Fountain. This is terrible news for at least two reasons:
1. A lot of women are in for a disappointment if they think that a cup of gelato (there are no cones available because the owners fear the cones might not be all-natural) is going to turn their lives into an Elizabeth Gilbert/Julia Roberts fairytale.
2. This means next time I go, the lines are going to be even longer and the already surly service (number of flavor tastings is already capped at one - see an earlier post on the ethics of this policy) will be even surlier. The number of flavor tastings may be brought down to zero, a shame, since the flavors are seasonal and there are often surprises.

The only upside of this I can possibly envision is that San Crispino might consider it in their best financial interests to keep the shop open on Tuesdays, the day they currently take off, if doing so is within the limits of Italian law. This is widely known as the best gelateria in Italy, if not the world. Or does being the best gelateria in Italy by default make you the best gelateria in the world? Ponder that tautology. Anyway, I adore this place, and also healed a broken heart there senior year of college by returning three to four times per day, to the point where every time I stepped through the doors, the staff (who had by then warmed to me) would smile and ask "Ancora?!?" (Again?!?!).

I tend to choose from the same constellation of flavors: the canella e zenzero (cinnamon and ginger), the meringue al cioccolatto (meringue with Valhrona chocolate chunks), the chocolate, the crema di San Crispino (honey flavor) and then chestnut, rumored to be the late Pope John Paul II's favorite, if it's available (it is in wintertime). The meringue is something else: a light, delicate and aerated frozen version of a meringue cookie, not too sweet (as the cookies often are), and studded with bitter chocolate. It's a perfect foil for some of the richer, creamier flavors. Goodness me, I can taste it just thinking about it. I am actually salivating right now...gross.

Anyway, ladies - enjoy the ice cream, enjoy the book, but try not to conflate fiction and reality. I've done that before and it's always turned out badly.

What else can you get for the price of an Otto ice cream?

2010-08-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

Really?

My friend Zoe Feigenbaum, a fantastic chef who runs the show over at The National cafe and restaurant on Rivington Street, just posted the following on Facebook:

"But Otto is SO good. $10 is nothing for such bliss. I would totally skip 1/2 a movie to eat ice cream of that caliber."

I'm trying to think of other things that one might get for $9.50, the price of a cup of Otto gelato. Here are some that come to mind quickly and easily; feel free to add your own:

-a flight to Marbella from London Stanstead on Easyjet
-four rides on the subway
-four slices of pizza
-unlimited texting on a Sprint PCS phone plan
-a movie ticket in 1998
-just over 21 stamps
-at least a dozen ears of sweet corn at the farmers market

Any other ideas?

What does it mean exactly to contribute research assistance to an ice cream tasting?

2010-08-04T16:07:00.000-07:00

I noticed that in both of Julia Moskin's articles, on the price of ice cream and on a survey of different packaged brands' strawberry versions, someone named Bao Ong contributed research assistance. I wonder what that entailed. Are they hiring more researchers? What are Bao's qualifications? And where do I send my CV?

For the record, Haagen Dazs (both regular and their "Five" edition), Blue Marble, which I recently reviewed, and Ciao Bella came in tops.

Slow news day? Not over at the Dining section.

2010-08-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

So, apparently most of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is magically gone (maybe all those small marine creatures whose bodies are bearing traces of oil and dispersants could explain how that worked), and Proposition 8 was overturned today, but MY inbox was filled with news of...wait for it...because it's a surprise...ok, here you go: ice cream.

Ryan Collerd for the New York Times

The New York Times ran several great articles on ice cream today, including one by Julia Moskin on a topic I've been pondering since I had my first $5.25 tablespoonful of Grom gelato: When did ice cream get so friggin' expensive, and can these overblown prices be justified? The answer is, um, sort of. In her article, "You Scream, I Scream...at the Price of Ice Cream,"after several ice cream makers vainly attempt to validate their prices, one ice cream artisan gives it to her straight:

“I just don’t think $5 is a fair price for a scoop of ice cream,” said Patricia Samson, an owner of Delicieuse, a scoop shop in Redondo Beach, Calif., where the flavors include oak sap, beer sorbet and lavender. Ms. Samson makes all of the ice cream served at Delicieuse, starting from raw milk: she pasteurizes, ripens and flavors the ice cream on site. She uses local fruit in season, opens only on weekends to keep wages to a minimum, and still manages to sell her ice cream for the relative bargain price of $2.95 a small. (Grom, it should be noted, will soon open its first United States store outside New York near her.) “Milk and sugar are cheap,” she said.

I'm going to have to go ahead and agree with that. Organic milk and organic sugar are a little more expensive, but - neighbor, please - not $5.25 expensive. Moskin forgot one of the most egregious offenders, though. Mr. Batali at Otto kick-started the inflation with his $12 pints, which, to be fair, they did deliver as far as my house. But I stopped in there with a friend the other day to get two cups to go, and they had the nerve to bring me a bill for $15 plus tax, and a space to leave a tip. By the time I heaved my jaw off the floor, did the math and got my card back, the gelato was all melted and I had somehow misplaced $19. The woman in the NYT story who paid $10 for two small servings made off like a bandit.

There were also stories on egg-free ice cream (more on this later) and recipes for maple spice, bittersweet chocolate, roasted hazelnut vanilla and summer berry ice cream.

Daily Candy recommends five new places in NY

2010-08-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

Daily Candy had a piece yesterday on five new frozen confectionaries around New York. A few of these sound gimmicky, like the under-100-calorie fat-, cholesterol- and gluten-free soft-serve shack with scratch and sniff banana wallpaper, but others, like the Pugliese woman selling gelato in toasted brioche, are begging to be sampled. I've allotted next week to gelato and ice cream sampling so be sure to check back soon for updates. ps - Thanks Clare for sending me the link!

Eight recipes from The Atlantic's food blog

2010-08-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

My wonderful food-nerd friend Liz sent me this Menu from the Atlantic Monthly's food blog. After a quick browse, the most promising of the recipes seems to be the creme brulee ice cream with pineapple shortcake. That said, this dish reminds me of something one would have seen in a fancy New York restaurant in the late 1990s.

The ice cream and topping are so good that you don't even need to agonize over the short cake. I often use pre-made short cakes from the grocery or I bake a sheet cake and cut into three-inch rounds. You can also purchase a pound cake or use a sweet biscuits as a short cake.

Crème Brulee Ice Cream

Makes 1 quart
    • 2 cups sugar
    • 1 pint heavy cream
    • 8 egg yolks
    • 1 ½ cups half and half cream
    • 2 tablespoons vanilla extract (The better quality your vanilla, the better your ice cream.)

Put sugar into heavy skillet and caramelize. Use a heavy duty pot holder to hold the handle of the skillet so you do not burn yourself. Tilt the skillet to evenly brown the sugar. When the sugar is dark brown, but not burned. Immediately add the cream. This will stop the sugar from burning. Cook until all the sugar has dissolved.

Beat the egg yolk with the half & half and vanilla.

Place the egg mixture over a double boiler and begin to heat. Slowly add in the sugar & cream mixture. Stir with a wire whisk.

Cook your custard mixture over medium heat for about 12 minutes until it will coat a wooden spoon.

Pour into another bowl and refrigerate. The custard should be completely cooled before you put it into the ice cream maker.

Follow your ice cream maker's directions and freeze.

Pineapple Topping

    • 1 fresh pineapple
    • ¼ pound butter
    • 2 cup brown sugar
    • 1 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
    • 1 tablespoons fresh orange juice
    • 1 teaspoons orange zest
    • 3 tablespoons dark rum

In large sauté pan, over medium heat, melt butter, then add brown sugar.

Add lemon juice, orange juice, and orange zest (if you don't have a zester you can finely grate the orange peel). Continue to cook until brown sugar has cooked to a syrup.

Peel and core pineapple, then cut length-wise, then in thirds. You want the pieces to be about two inches each. Add pineapple to brown sugar syrup in the pan.

Add the rum and cinnamon. Heat for just about two minutes You want the pineapple to remain firm.

Spoon warm pineapple in rum-flavored syrup over short cake. Then top with crème brulee ice cream.

Proustian moment #4: A reminder of my early professional ambitions

2010-08-02T06:01:00.000-07:00

I emailed the post on ice cream and music to my childhood best friend Sofia, and she emailed back this morning from Paris with a recommendation (Martine Lambert from Deauville, now with a small shop on 192 Rue de Grenelle in the 7th) and a hilarious ambition that we shared as pre-teens:

"Do you remember when we wanted to get summer jobs at Haagen-Dazs on 8th Avenue? Our plan was to show up every morning at work with gym mats so that we could do sit-ups on the floor inbetween customer scoops."

Professional Foray #5, Grom, Bleecker Street, NY

2010-08-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

A confession is in order. This is, and has been, my favorite ice cream (or gelato) in New York since winter. So this is less of an evaluation than a sticky, approving wink at what I think is so far the top ice cream in town. I have friends who have come back from trips to Italy raving about this place.

My first scoops, in winter, were of chocolate and chestnut, a winning combination if there ever was one. Later on, I came back for spring flavors: ginger, crema di Grom (crema, an eggy custard flavor, with chocolate flakes and crumbled vanilla biscuits), lemon cake, and the flavor of the month, fior di latte with candied cherries and chocolate flakes. This terribly sophisticated take on Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia did not quite do it for me (I prefer a base with more flavor than just milk), but the crema di Grom was outstanding - lush and full of tasty chunks. What sets Grom apart is the quality of its ingredients, which manifest themselves in an unbeatable texture. Furthermore, texture aside, the flavors are also excellent: the chocolate is complex and rich (I always have the regular dark chocolate as the extra-dark chocolate is overwhelming for me), the coffee intense and smooth, the chestnut gentle and well-rounded.

One for each hand.

Anyhow, I returned Friday evening with several friends in a professional capacity (my previous half-dozen visits were sort of an internship, maybe?) Like the greedy children in Umberto Eco's story, my friend Mara and I decided to get two small cups, so we could try four flavors. One of our cups was vanilla and chocolate, the other tiramisu and crema di Grom. The scooper, a very sweet Italian youth who I am guessing is the nephew of a friend of the owner of the franchise and who needed a summer job in New York while he takes the odd English class (his English was halting, to be generous), graciously let us try as many flavors as we wanted as long as we kept smiling at him. All four flavors were truly, truly excellent - the vanilla/chocolate cup was like the ultimate version of a Mr. Softee swirl, and the tiramisu and the crema di Grom had similar mix-ins, so texturally they were a brilliant complement.

These flavors, and several crazy, crazy Youtube videos, were then savored on a stoop on Leroy street. All in all, an excellent evening.

Grom, several locations in New York City; this one was at 233 Bleecker St (at Carmine), (+1) 212 206 1738, http://www.grom.it/eng/gelaterie.php, small $5.25, medium $6.25, large $7.25, extra-large $8.25

Proustian moment #3: How to Eat Ice Cream, by Umberto Eco

2010-08-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

One of the commenters on the Faith and Theology blog, Ortus Memoria, posted this charming essay by Umberto Eco. You can also read it via Google Books.

“When I was little, children were bought two kinds of ice cream, sold from those white wagons with canopies made of silvery metal: either the two-cent cone or the four-cent ice-cream pie. The two-cent cone was very small, in fact it could fit comfortably into a child’s hand, and it was made by taking the ice cream from its container with a special scoop and piling it on the cone. Granny always suggested I eat only a part of the cone, ten thrown away the pointed end, because it had been touched by the vendor’s hand (though it was the best part, nice and crunchy, and it was regularly eaten in secret, after a pretense of discarding it).

The four-cent pie was made by a special little machine, also silvery, which pressed two disks of sweet biscuit against cylindrical section of ice cream. First you had to thrust your tongue into the gap between the biscuits until it touched the central nucleus of ice cream, then gradually, you ate the whole thing, the biscuit surfaces softening as they became soaked in creamy nectar. Granny had no advice to give here: in theory the pies had been touched only by the machine; in practice, the vendor had held them in his hand while giving them to us, but it was impossible to isolate the contaminated area.

I was fascinated, however, by some of my peers, whose parents bought them not a four-cent pie but two two-cent cones. These privileged children advanced proudly with one cone in their right hand and one in their left; expertly moving their head, from side to side they licked first one, then the other. This liturgy seemed to me so sumptuously enviable, that many times I asked to be allowed to celebrate it. In vain. My elders were inflexible: a four-cent ice, yes; but two two-cent ones, absolutely no.

As anyone can see, neither mathematics nor economy or dietetics justified this refusal. Nor did hygiene, assuming that in due course the tips of both cones were discarded. The pathetic, and obviously mendacious, justification was that a boy concerned with turning his eyes from one cone to the other was more inclined to stumble over stones, steps, or cracks in the pavement. I dimly sensed that there was another secret justification, cruelly pedagogical, but I was unable to grasp it.

Today, citizen and victim of consumer society, a civilization of excess and waste (which the society of the thirties was not), I realize that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cones instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested excess. And this is precisely why they were denied me: because they looked indecent, and insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth. Only spoiled children at two cones at once, those children who in fairy tales were rightly punished, as Pinocchio was when he rejected the skin and the stalk. And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up their children in the foolish theater of “I’d like to but I can’t.” They were preparing them to turn up at a tourist-class check-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini.

Nowadays the moralist risks seeming at odds with morality, in a world where the consumer civilization now wants even adults to be spoiled, and promises them always something more, from the wristwatch in the box of detergent to the bonus bangle sheathed, with the magazine it accompanies, in a plastic envelope. Like the parents of those ambidextrous gluttons I so envied, the consumer civilization pretends to give more, but actually gives, for four cents, what is worth four cents. You will throw away the old transistor radio to purchase the new one that boasts an alarm clock as well, but some inexplicable defect in the mechanism will guarantee that the new radio lasts only a year. The new cheap car will have leather seats, double side mirrors adjustable from the inside, and a paneled dashboard, but it will not last nearly so long as the glorious old Fiat 500, which, even when it broke down, could be started again with a kick.

The morality of the old days made Spartans of us all, while today’s morality wants us all to be Sybarites.” -1989

Umberto Eco, “How to Eat Ice Cream,” in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1994) 107-110.

The Ethics of Ice Cream, from a theology blog

2010-08-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

I found this funny blog post by an Australian professor on the ethics (and logic) of ice cream tasting. Read the full post here, from his blog Faith and Theology:

Pistacchio, lemon, chocolate orange, caffè, caramelised fig, rum raisin, green apple, bacio, blood orange... I made a quick provisional review of the range of colours and flavours, and then, determined not to waste another moment, I resolved to begin the all-important business of flavour sampling. "I'd like to try the melon and the dark chocolate," I said to the girl behind the counter, who had been waiting with benign attentiveness.

"No, I'm sorry," she replied at once. "Only one sample per customer." She pointed with tight-lipped authority to a sign on the counter that confirmed this ominous regulation, the capital letters printed in a stark juridical font.

"One sample?" I said, a little unsettled. "But how can I tell which flavour I want, if I only get one sample?"

"I'm sorry, one sample per customer."

"But don't you see?" I said, smiling generously. "Unless I try two flavours, how can I choose the one I prefer?"

She shrugged pleasantly, peering down at me like a judge from the bench, all kindliness and good intentions, but ultimately powerless before those ineluctable proceedings. "I'm really sorry, but nobody's allowed more than one sample. It's the rule."

As everybody knows, tasting different flavours is one of the chief joys of visiting a gelateria. But the samples do not merely serve an aesthetic purpose, they also have an important psychological benefit: the comparison of flavours allows you to make a final decision free of the usual burden of Menu Anxiety (together with the threatening subsequent possibility of Menu Regret). On this particular occasion, however, things were becoming difficult. Under these circumstances, the choice of a sample was itself rapidly descending into all the consternation of an actual decision.

It is a fabulous, albeit sad, story, well-told. I run into this problem all the time. It is the evolutionary precursor to the "only one flavor in a small" policy, which I also abhor. In an ideal world, ice cream would be sold by weight and we could put as many flavors as we want, in the amounts that we want, into one cup or cone and pay for the amount of product we're getting. I realize this takes more effort on the part of the scooper but I see it as an opportunity to tip generously in recognition of her or his hard work.

Come to think of it, this ideal world actually exists, on Ilha Grande, an island a few hours' drive from Rio de Janeiro. I stayed there for a few days once and in the town was a little ice cream and candy shop were you took a cup and helped yourself to all the flavors you wanted, and then handed it over to be weighed. That experience took that place from any old bum's definition of a "tropical paradise" to actual, honest-to-goodness paradise for me.

Less debauched ice cream music

2010-08-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

This is from an old NPR story from three years ago:

In New York City, summer has a theme song: the loud, distorted and high-pitched jingle of Mister Softee ice cream trucks.
But as the weather warms up, a pair of Brooklyn artists is asking whether the trucks could serve up something sweeter.
Jeffrey Lopez and Lauren Rosati are holding an online competition — called the Ice Cream Headache — to come up with a better ice cream song.
So far, they have received 40 remakes and remixes of the Mister Softee theme — ranging from a Balinese take on the song to one rendered entirely by a human beatbox.

You can listen to the finalists here.

Ice cream + music: an invitation to lechery

2010-08-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

It's clear that, given the name of this blog, I'm not above a lame, semi-erotic ice cream pun. However, the last decade's catalog of ice cream music is disturbingly pornographic, and always manages to bring race into the mix as well. Here are some lyrics from one example, "Ice Cream Man" by Nicki Minaj:

Can i lick your, can i lick your icecreamcone

Do it like E.T. i make a ni–a phone home

I really like vanilla, but my favorite color chocolate

chocolate, chocolate, gargle it and gargle it

and then later:

Just put a lot of nuts, imma lick it off the tip

Am I the only one blushing?

= ?

I remember when my best friend Sofia and I first heard Wu-Tang Clan's "Ice Cream," she was extremely keen on it because she got a shout-out as a "butta pecan 'Rican" (she was half Puerto Rican). I was bummed because there was no lychee flavor shout-out or green tea or whatever I thought a half Chinese person deserved (although a "colored Asian" features in the video and lyrics). It is also an excellent song, although the use of ice cream flavors as a racially exclusionary rhetorical device is at best questionable. Of course, at the time, we were all of twelve so these questions weren't weighing too heavily. But in retrospect, I find the overt sexualization of an innocent treat to be pretty questionable; as I reported in last week's roundup of ice cream news, it's not beyond the realm of the possible for the ice cream man to have his eye (or his hands) on little kids.

Apparently this tradition dates back several decades. In 1975, "Hokey Pokey (the Ice Cream Song)" was released by Richard Thompson. Its lyrics include the following:

Girl on the corner with the tight dress on

You know she don’t know nothing so fine

Feels so good when you put it in your mouth

Sends a shiver all down your spine

In retrospect, these are pretty tame. But still!

Dispatches from the Frontline #3: the Shanghai World Expo

2010-08-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Breaking news from Mona, LME's Asia-Pacific correspondent:

A Modern Day Ice Cream Superhero: Dondurman to the Rescue!

In case you haven't heard, this summer Shanghai has been hosting the highly-anticipated and much-hyped 2010 World Expo. The modern equivalent of the Paris World's Fair that functions more like an international public relations orgy, this year's "Better Cities, Better Life"-themed Expo has taken over a nearly 1,000-acre swath of the metropolitan area and created a temporary city within a city. Here, hundreds of countries, corporations and industries have gathered for the summer put their best face forward and impress the tens of millions of tourists flocking to Shanghai to see the Expo. Visitors willingly wait in lines for hours and hours and hours in order to access each of the Expo's hundreds of pavilions, hoping to experience something exotic. In other words, move over EPCOT.

Waiting for a chance to visit the Morocco pavilion

Dondurma: Turkey's past, Mona's future

Personally, my own visit to the Expo meant a fantastic chance to score a sampling of delicious food from around the world. And more than anything, the potential to seek out a really satisfying ice cream experience in China.

A little backstory on this point. Historically, ice cream in its finest form has not been a part of local food culture in China. As of recently, most major Chinese cities can boast the presence of at least one massive outlet of Haagen Daaz and a reasonable selection of gelato vendors to cater to the tastes of foreign tourists and ex-pats. Inevitably, however, any hardcore ice cream lover will eventually find these options hackneyed, limiting, overpriced and boring. That said, as an LME correspondent, my mission while living here in China and traveling throughout the region are encounters with ice cream that might just challenge the otherwise prevalent and dismissive myth that this part of the world is some kind of lactose intolerant backwater that dairy addicts like myself should fear.
And that brings me back to Shanghai, my hungry outing to the World Expo and a face-to-face encounter with a real life ice cream superhero.

As Anna has already explained, dondurma is the word for the special elastic variety of Turkish ice cream that gets its special stretchy quality from salep, a substance derived from wild orchid root. I grew up in an Iraqi-Lebanese family and thanks to the linguistic influence of the Ottoman Empire, dondurma happens to be the same word I have used to beg my mom for ice cream since childhood. Unsurprisingly, when I saw a booth selling gooey milk-flavored ice cream in the Expo's Turkish pavilion, my heart leapt with nostalgic delight!


milk flavor

It was an unbearably hot day in Shanghai, and to my pleasure the vendor (very-cleverly named Dondurman) provided a deeply satisfying helping of creamy, stretchy, fresh and milky ice cream.


Thank you, Dondurman

Our hero

Dondurma magic

Not only that, but the animated Turkish gentleman who served us took out all the stops and put on a full-blown, corn-ball performance: wielding a traditionally long-handled paddle to stretch out and pile ice cream high on the cone while serenading my friend, twirling the cone over and around our heads, and posing coyly for my camera.

All said and done, it was well worth the 25RMB ($3.50) for a cone.

My natural assumption was that Dondurman was probably a Turkish company that had dropped into town for solely the occasion of the Expo. But something told me to hold onto some hope that my encounter with Dondurman in East Asia would not just be an isolated incident. I was fascinated to learn after some web-hunting that the company is actually based in Tokyo. That's right, a Japanese company entirely dedicated to providing a Middle Eastern specialty ice cream throughout the region! And it simply wouldn't be Japanese if the company didn't have an adorable mascot and catchy jingle to boot.

FYI Dondurman caters to large orders and corporate sized events throughout the region, with a selection of six seriously lickable flavors: Milk, Strawberry, Mango, Chai, Fig & Rum, and Cherry. If you're interested, you can place your dry-ice-packed order via their fancy website: www.dondurman.com

This is Mona, reporting for Lick Me Everywhere from the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China.

Dispatches from the Frontline #2: Gaborone, Botswana

2010-08-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

This just in from Clare Gupta, LME's Africa correspondent. Thank you, Clare!

Southern Africa is not a region known for its good ice cream. For the most part, the ice cream you find at grocery stores or served in restaurants is made from vegetable, not milk fat, giving it a strange aerated mushy quality. That said, there are a handful of exceptions, and the homemade gelato served at Sanitas, a tea garden in Botswana’s capital city Gaborone, is one of them.

Sanitas is a lovely native plant nursery that I stumbled upon in the otherwise dusty, dreary town of Gaborone. Their outdoor café is situated around a gorgeous old enormous fig tree, with tables nestled between palm trees and other interesting sorts of plants. In addition to serving a tasty lunch, they also serve HOMEMADE gelato! Given the dearth of ice cream options here, I was shocked to discover that not only did they serve gelato but that it was prepared in-house.

That'll do.

It comes either on a cone or in a pretty glass dish with various accompaniments such as black cherry sauce, vanilla-flavored home-baked cookies or fresh strawberries, straight from the nursery’s garden. I did what I always do, which is order a scoop of gelato on a sugar cone (ice cream is just not as satisfying when it's not licked from a cone) with toppings on the side—in this case, the fresh strawberries. I tried out the chocolate flavor and while it was not show-stopping, it was pretty up to snuff as gelato goes, with just the right balance of creaminess and iciness that good gelato should have.

What made it mentionable were the fresh strawberries—the mix of a crunchy sugar cone, sweet-tart strawberries and cool chocolate flavor absolutely hit the spot.

Next time if I can resist the strawberries I’m thinking I may go for the option of a scoop of vanilla bean topped with a splash of Amarula—South Africa’s deliciously-flavored liquor made from cream and berries from the native Amarula tree…yum.

Ice cream news round-up, week of July 31: Lindsay Lohan, ice cream in Vegas and Canada, ice cream man molester

2010-07-30T11:36:00.000-07:00

Here are some headlines from the world of ice cream:

Lindsay Lohan has been demanding Ben and Jerry's ice cream in jail.

If you're smart enough to get a business degree from Harvard, you're smart enough to get yourself a job as an ice cream sommelier.

A look behind-the-scenes at the Ben and Jerry's factory in Vermont.

Every parent's worst nightmare: an ice cream man inappropriately touches a 5-year-old girl in Denver.

The L.A. Times has a round-up of unusual ice cream options in Las Vegas, including a foot-tall, $1,000 sundae served in Baccarat crystal and topped, as it should be in Vegas, with edible gold.

Unilever, which owns Ben and Jerry's and is one of the world's major ice cream manufacturers, has a machine that, using facial recognition technology, gives you free ice cream if you smile. Their truck is touring Europe, according to this Facebook page.

Andrew Breitbart, please find the racial controversy in this news: according to a mock election held in DC, 40% of Democrats prefer chocolate, 80% of Republicans prefer strawberry. Come on, you know it's there. Chocolate? Come on.

A DC chef has created a CSA-style membership club for his homemade, gourmet ice cream.

The Calgary Herald has a guide to some local places in case you're in Canada.

Professional Foray #4, Blue Marble, Brooklyn, NY

2010-07-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night, after an excellent meal at The Grocery on Smith Street with my genius friend/professional hero Michelle Goldberg, we hopped on our bikes and headed down Atlantic Avenue to the Blue Marble Ice Cream shop. This location has more flavors than the one on Court Street. We almost missed our chance, since the kindly chef at The Grocery, who spends so much time in the dining room you'd think he wishes he was a waiter, informed us that he makes the best ice cream in the world, after which our check was suspiciously slow in coming.

Anyway, we made it. I had read about their strawberry flavor on Yelp or a similar site, where someone was raving that it was the greatest they'd ever tasted. It does have a very pronounced, tart strawberry flavor, but to my kiddie palate, it was slightly too tangy. I can appreciate the appeal it would hold for more sophisticated ice cream connoisseurs, or for purists. But I like an emphasis on the cream in my ice cream, and this tasted too fruity to me. I also tried root beer flavor, which tasted like a root beer float, except without the wonderful textural interplay of fizzy soda and creamy vanilla ice cream. Instead, those two sensations and flavors get mushed into one single not-as-delicious and even mildly disconcerting experience.

In the end, I went for (surprise) cookies and cream, chocolate and black cherry. From here forward, I'm going to use cookies and cream, pending availability, as my benchmark flavor, as well as chocolate, the same way one can judge a Lebanese restaurant by its hummus and kibbeh. Why? Both of those flavors leave very little margin for error: either do them well, or go home.

Soft serve in Rwanda; courtesy of Blue Marble Ice Cream

In Blue Marble's case, they were both tasty, but nothing exciting. The ice cream itself is of a very high quality; they use milk and cream from an organic dairy co-operative in Pennsylvania where the cows eat grass (as opposed to all the other wretched scum they normally eat in a feedlot, according to Michael Pollan). But neither of those flavors knocked me off my feet. The black cherry with chocolate chips was very good, however - an upscale, organic and altogether smoother and more successful rendition of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia. I'll be going back for a few other flavors (ginger and mint chip, for example) soon.

This company is notable, if not for its chocolate ice cream, for its social efforts. They are promoting ice cream as a development solution in Rwanda, use eco-friendly materials and packaging, use organic sugar and serve organic coffee, and support local Brooklyn bakeries by selling bagels and brownies and the like in their shop. I know it's a cliche to call such a yuppie paradise a "yuppie paradise," but it really is one, without being obnoxious. It's just a nice place where concerned parents can treat their children and themselves to ice cream without worrying about pesticides and poisons and corn syrups and other demons.

Blue Marble Ice Cream, 420 Atlantic Avenue, 718-858-1100, 186 Underhill Avenue (Prospect Heights), new location at 196 Court Street (Cobble Hill), www.bluemarbleicecream.com, MiniScoops are $2.90, $4.25 and $5.15, regular scoops are $3.89, $5.75, and $6.95.

The Hamptons, Redeemed: Professional Foray #3, Sip n' Soda, Southampton

2010-07-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

After a disappointing morning cone at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton, it was with some trepidation that I approached Sip n' Soda in Southampton. Like the Candy Kitchen, it's also a luncheonette, and like the Candy Kitchen, it also claims "homemade ice cream." Even more suspiciously, their menu also featured "Fresh Peach," which set off red flags. Was this just another ye olde time-y ice cream shoppe hocking mediocre product out of a cutesy, retro diner?

I am happy to report that the answer is a resounding "no": this is the real thing. I had coffee chip, chocolate chip cookie dough and chocolate in a cone, and each flavor was excellent. The ice cream had actual ice cream consistency, and to me was very American: the scoops were hard, the butterfat percentage was high without rendering the texture occlusive (I'd say it was premium), and everything tasted natural and fresh.


Success!

My only complaint, which I later passed onto the lovely co-owner, Mark Parash, was that the amount of mix-ins, such as the chips in the coffee chip or the cookie dough in the vanilla cookie dough, was a little skimpy. I'd like to run into a bite of something or other more often than not as I make my way down a cone.


That is a genuine, post-cone smile of happiness.

As I was rummaging around the internet, I discovered that Mark Parash's grandfather William started Candy Kitchen in the 1920s. (An article describing the family business can be found here.) Bewildered - the discrepancy between the two establishments' quality is vast - I called Mark to check if this was truly the case. It turns out that his grandfather sold the Candy Kitchen sometime in the 1940s, "after World War II," he said.

I love when major events like World War II get mixed up in ice cream tales.

Mark, now 39, runs Sip n' Soda with his uncle Jim; William and his wife Nicoletta originally opened it in 1958. Mark said he makes most of the ice cream himself, starting with homemade syrups - chocolate, coffee, vanilla, and bases made from scratch. The fresh peach flavor, which I now deeply regret I didn't try, uses Georgia peaches. Not local peaches? "Only Georgia peaches," he told me. "They're by far superior." The strawberries, he said, are local, and in a few weeks he'll be launching a fresh cantaloupe flavor. If this keeps up, I may find myself back on the LIRR.

And thank you to the gaggle of gorgeous brunettes - Nicole, Kelly and Michele - who hosted me over the weekend and indulged all of my ice cream excursions. I had a wonderful, wonderful time.

Sip n' Soda, 40 Hampton Road, Southampton, NY. 631-283-9752. Single $4, double $6.

From the NYT magazine: Humphry Slocombe

2010-07-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

When I was in San Francisco over the New Year, I got waylaid by the Malted Vanilla with Peanut Brittle and Milk Chocolate Pieces at Bi-Rite Creamery, so I never made it to Humphry Slocombe, although I did fill a buy-ten-get-one-free card in less than 72 hours. This NYT magazine article from last month makes me think another visit to the West Coast might be in order, though...

Still, Godby has drawn a loyal following from the start. His ice cream addresses two major grievances in the contemporary culinary scene: boredom with menus that all look the same, and irritation with the orthodoxy governing how we’re all supposed to eat (local, sustainable, organic, etc.). At $2.75 for a single scoop, $3.75 for a double, Humphry Slocombe solved both problems. As a result, its fan base swelled with the kind of jaded cooks and eaters who dream of never seeing another chicken Caesar or tuna au poivre again. Mark Sullivan, chef of the San Francisco restaurant Spruce, calls the Secret Breakfast flavor “an obsession.” Leah Rosenberg, an artist and a pastry chef, says, “The first time I tasted Jesus Juice sorbet, I felt like someone, at long last, understood me.”

Dispatches from the Frontline #1, A Yakult Classic: ultimate summertime slushies

2010-07-27T04:14:00.000-07:00

A Yakult Classic: ultimate summertime slushies, by Mona:

Yakult! Have you heard of it? Well the first thing you should know is that it is pure delight when consumed frozen and on its way to thawing into a puddle of slushy goodness. Now, I recognize that slushies aren't ice cream per say...however, when you're resident in an small Chinese city where ice cream isn't part of the local food culture (as I am this summer) you have to get your sweet, frozen, yummy fixes where you can.

A Japanese product, Yakult is a very popular yogurt drink with high-concentrations of probiotic bacteria (really good for your tummy) and sugar (really good for your soul) that comes in tiny and distinctly-shaped bottles. The plastic bottle is conveniently easy to cut through after you've frozen your Yakult and are ready to dig in for a taste of tart, icy, milky delight.

Children from Taiwan to Brazil have grown up on the summertime treat of frozen-but-slightly-melty Yakult. Even though I've only recently discovered the childish joy of a Yakult slushy (thanks to my wonderful fiance) they are now a regular evening treat and one of my favorite "homemade" desserts of all time. Unsurprisingly, there is even a Facebook group devoted to the love of frozen Yakult, which I refuse to join only because the consequences of joining anything on Facebook increasingly creeps me out!

But wait, there's more! A new Yakult flavor has come out this summer in an ice cream parlor chain in the Philippines. I'll be heading to Manila later this summer and will be sure to try it out and report back. Meanwhile, I suggest you close your laptop right now and run like a spazzy little kid to your nearest Asian grocery store so that you can stock your freezer with Yakult for those nights when you are too lazy to get out of your apartment to buy some ice cream.

This is Mona, reporting for Lick Me Everywhere from Yixing, China.

Professional Foray #2, Candy Kitchen, Bridgehampton

2010-07-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

This place stinks:

Stinking place

According to one of the teenagers working there, it's been there since 1925, and I remember it from being in elementary school and going to Amagansett every weekend with my friend Liz. The bus that we took from Manhattan dropped us off right across the street, and it always seemed like a great place. Unfortunately, their ice cream is mediocre (to be generous). The "fresh peach" flavor that my friend Nicole had was the neon color of a t-shirt from The Body Glove that I had in the 1980s, and there were no peaches in it to speak of. My cherry vanilla and cookies and cream scoops were foamy, not-flavorful and completely unsatisfying. The flavors tasted like aerated, sweetened milk with fillers and thickeners mixed in.


I must be smiling because I haven't tried it yet.

The man behind the counter lost his patience while I tried to make a carefully weighed, considered decision (his exact words were "I don't have all day to sit around while you pick"), so I can't even award points for nice friendly service. In the end, it is a small local business, so I'll cut my criticism short and end this post now with a snapshot of the interior.

Bridgehampton, Main Street, 631-537-9885. Small cone $3.25, large $6.50

Call me a conservative

2010-07-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

Most people who know me would not describe me as "conservative." Something about ice cream, though, needles my Glenn Beck instincts and brings out the reactionary Tea Party member in me. Foie gras ice cream, for example, is innovative. But it does not sound delicious. Rather, it sounds heinous. Likewise the caviar flavor. Has anyone tried these flavors? You can get them in different restaurants and boutiques around France. Are they any good? Prove me wrong, please. Normally I'm an open-minded person.

This is liver. Remember that.

Proustian moments #2, from Mona

2010-07-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

This memory comes from one of my top food-nerd friends (and one of my favorite people on this green earth), Mona. She is also on assignment as my new Asia correspondent. You can read about her food adventures in China thus far (and I highly recommend you do) here. And without further ado, I present Mona's ice cream memory:

I'll never ever ever forget the first time I had strawberry ice cream. It was (simply put) a glorious moment in life.

Now, I'm talking here about REAL strawberry ice cream with REAL strawberries chopped up and mixed in. Not that oddly bright pink junk you see in the supermarket freezer section.

So there I was at the awkward age of fourteen, hanging out on the beach in Del Mar, spending a lazy afternoon on a big blue towel, thinking about the usual things most silly young teenage girls might obsess/ponder over in this same situation. You know: cute boys, sand stuck in between my toes, cute boys, whether I should put on more sunscreen, etc. I think the combination of salty air and summer heat must have made me especially thirsty because what I remember is eagerly running to the parking lot to buy a bottle of water from the little snack cart. (Of course at that point I didn't suspect that I was about to taste something sublime.)

What Mona was thinking about before she learned about strawberry ice cream

The black pavement was burning the soles of my sandy feet and I realized water wasn't gonna do it for me. There was a lady selling homemade ice cream at the snack shop and so I scoped out her offerings. I don't even remember why, but I picked the strawberry, knowing well that my favorites were cookies n' cream and peanutbutter-chocolate. I remember my first taste, and my regret that I was already fourteen and had never discovered this yummy combination of sweet, icy, milky strawberry goodness before. Perhaps needless to say, since then my all time favorite flavor is (real) strawberry ice cream, no matter the season. This is coming from a serious chocoholic.

Now look at her!

Ice cream in the news: the business of ice cream

2010-07-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

Time magazine reports that despite the recession, "the ice cream market appears to be hot." Apparently more people are asking for double scoops, too, instead of single. Is that because there are a lot of obese people not watching their figures, or because ice cream is simply too delicious to only take one flavor at a time? Probably the latter.

This?

The New York Times also had an ice cream business article, but theirs claimed that it's the weather, rather than the ice cream market, that's too hot. Instead of venturing out for cones, people are staying indoors where there's air conditioning.

or this?

Proustian moments #1, from Olivia Snaije

2010-07-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

The first installment in a series of ice cream recollections. This one comes from my friend Olivia, a writer in Paris. When I first sent her this blog, she immediately shared this:

Cioccolato con panna is one of my favorites

I grew up in Rome, not the chic new pedestrian Rome, but the old Rome with cars and motorcycles zipping all over. Besides a few dreary months during the winter, it seemed to me as if every day after school, I would link arms with my best friend Sandra and go for a stroll. It was a given that we would stop and buy a gelato. We both, unfailingly, chose the same flavors every day: fragola, limone e panna, panna being the home-made whipped cream they put on ice cream. I lived near the Campo de' Fiori and she lived in Piazza Farnese so our perimeter was very small. We would usually go to a gelateria on Via dei Baulari; once in a while we might cross over the border that was Corso Vittorio Emanuele and buy an ice-cream near Piazza Navona. As Sandra recently confirmed to me in an email: "we adored fragola-limone."

Thank you, Olivia! I'll be sharing mine soon, and would love to hear more from everyone else.

Nothing to do with ice cream but...

2010-07-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

The news has been filled with this report of an Israeli court finding a Palestinian man guilty of rape for lying about his religion (he claimed he was Jewish) and having consensual sex with a Jewish woman. Can you imagine how the world's prisons would overflow if obtaining sex under false pretences was really a prosecutable crime? What a strange precedent to set.

Professional Foray #1: The Odeon's ice cream cart

2010-07-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

Last night my friend Helen and I went on my first professional tasting trip last night, to the Odeon's ice cream cart. Thank you to my friend Maisie for sending the tip, by the way. Helen, who had graciously arrived for dinner carrying a six-pack of Baked by Melissa nano-cupcakes, cheerfully accepted that our dessert was going to have more courses than our dinner.

What a delicious little gimmick.

The Odeon's ice cream cart is right in front of the restaurant, underneath the striped awning. The management has sweetly put several benches out on the sidewalk on West Broadway, so ice cream customers can enjoy the sight of strolling Eurotrash and Tribeca families, attractive down to the toddler, while they savor their cones. The waffle cones are house made, as is the ice cream, which is made fresh every day, three flavors per day, including butter pecan, strawberry, rocky road (I will be going back expressly to sample this flavor when the time is right), pistachio and banana vanilla wafer.

Last night there was good news and bad news. The bad news was the mint chip, which had an overtly herbal peppermint flavor that tastes more like a stick of gum or a swig of mouthwash than ice cream. The good news was the cookies and cream, one of my favorite flavors, which had huge, generous chunks of homemade chocolate cookies. The cookies were large and dry and crumbly enough to stay crispy and provide real textural contrast to the ice cream, although they didn't have the lardy Oreo-style cream filling that makes commercial cookies and cream sometimes strangely satisfying (I'm talking about when that cream filling starts coating your mouth because the cold of the ice cream means the fat molecules aren't melting as swiftly as they should be.) The coffee was also excellent news - the flavor, in its sweetness and delicacy, reminded me of Haagen Dazs, but the texture was softer and lighter, and nicely melty. $4 for one scoop, $6 for two.

145 West Broadway, (212) 233-0507, www.theodeonrestaurant.com/ (call for flavors of the day)

Obama's racist ice cream

2010-07-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

Credit: www.mdiic.com

Boy, is this stupid: Right-wing bloggers are attempting to spin Obama's ice cream outing with his family in Maine as an attempt to energize his Black Panther base via subliminal messaging coded in an ice cream logo from a store run by, as the CBS news article above points out, a white lady in a state with an almost non-existent African-American population. This is presumably the same constituency he was trying to reach with the New Yorker's Politics of Fear cover, only his tactics by now have become considerably more subtle.

National Ice Cream Day 2011

2010-07-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

By the way, last Sunday July 18th was National Ice Cream Day. I confess I forgot to observe this holiday with the gravity it deserves, but I did have Ciao Bella cookies and cream gelato the day before and, perhaps because I could secretly sense that Sunday was the big day, I requested a scoop of vanilla gelato to go on top of my iced mocha at Via Quadronno.

How did you celebrate?

To make up for my offense, I am going to begin planning next year's National Ice Cream Day festivities right now. What should I do? Who wants to join? Any ideas?

Ice cream kills

2010-07-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

Walter Poland, a man with more than a half-dozen DUI's to his name, was driving an ice cream truck when he ran over another man last October in New Jersey. He was indicted a few days ago. My condolences to the deceased's family, and shame on Mr. Poland.

Ice cream for dogs. Hmm.

2010-07-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

There is a new ice cream truck in London serving dog ice cream. I'm going to need a few hours to process this before I have something coherent to say about it. I imagine it keeps them cool...?

Israel v. P-stine, the three-scoop showdown

2010-07-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

I was raised on Haagen Dazs ice cream. My mom served it at dinner parties, and for years it was Haagen Dazs that set the benchmark for what coffee, strawberry, chocolate and vanilla ice cream flavors should taste like. Throughout elementary school, I started every morning with a diabetes bomb breakfast of champions: a cup of Twinings Earl Grey tea with milk and sugar, topped with a big scoop of Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream, after which I was sent off to the poor teachers at St. Luke's School who had to deal with a little sugar and caffeine-fueled Tasmanian devil. No wonder I used to get in trouble for attacking other, more passive students.

This is all to say that I was very sad to hear, when living in Beirut, that the ice cream company of my childhood funds settlements in the West Bank that are an obstacle to peace. I wonder, and would be grateful to anyone who knows the answer to this, why Haagen Dazs is then able to operate several profitable franchises around Beirut, including one right in front of the Parliamentary building in Place d'Etoile?

However, there is another option, available in the West Bank city of Ramallah: Baladna ("Our Country") ice creams. Since I was not legally allowed to travel to Israel or Palestine during my time living in Lebanon and Syria, I didn't actually get to go there, even though the woman in the picture looks a lot like me. I cannot personally vouch for the fact that the texture was slightly gummy, some of the flavors a little too sweet, but the portions generous and the service charming. They have my favorite policy - the "as many flavors as you want in a cone" policy. Snickers flavor was delicious, as most peanut butter-flavored ice creams are. And they were open at 9 am, so it was the perfect cap to a falafel and hummus breakfast.

The local operation

The Baladna selection. Bubble Gum is not recommended.

Not me.

Starbucks, incidentally, has a similarly bad reputation for supporting Israeli causes, but luckily right across the street from Baladna is local alternative "Stars and Bucks."

Goodbye Axis of Evil, hello Great Satan: a MidEast ice cream roundup

2010-07-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

I recently moved back to New York City, where I was born and raised, from Beirut, Lebanon and Damascus, Syria, where I've been living and working as a freelance writer for the past two years. I was surprised at how much excellent gelato was waiting for me in New York, but more on that later. I'll say my goodbyes to Beirut and Damascus with a roundup of a few excellent ice cream places and memories in Lebanon and Syria, with Egypt, Turkey and Morocco to follow. By the way, "ice cream" in Arabic is بوظة pronounced "booza." In Turkey it's "dondurma." Learn how to say "Where is the bathroom?" and "Please" and "Thank you" and "Dude, what are you staring at?" and you will be more or less fine in any of these countries.

Lebanon

Hanna's: Hanna's is the closest thing to a Willy Wonka experience that Beirut has to offer. This small corner ice cream shop, where everything is handmade by two married geriatrics (see my friend Anissa's brilliant blog post on their operation), bakes their own almond brittle that they swirl into milk-flavored ice cream. On days when they're baking it, the whole block smells like caramelizing sugar. They also make a fabulous apricot flavor with pine nuts mixed in; it's called "qamr ed-dine" which I think translates to something like "the moon of God" and is made from an apricot fruit leather that is particularly popular during Ramadan and is available by the sheet - sheets as big as a page of the New York Times. It's fun to sit on the corner in the broken plastic chairs that are sometimes on the sidewalk and stare at all the people who come to get their ice cream. It's in Achrafieh down the street from Spinney's supermarket.

Gruen/Oslo: I lived in Beirut for two years and spent untold sums on Oslo ice cream (sold mainly at a restaurant called Gruen, easily the best European-style ice cream in the region, before I met the owner, Nayla Audi. I wish I had had some wasta (Arabic for "connections") to her before, since this ice cream seems to get more expensive every time I go, to the point where I spent $10 on my last cone, after tip. That said, the Valhrona sorbet is phenomenal, and her mint flavor (After Eight) and cookies and cream are superb. Her more eclectic flavors are not only elegant but look gorgeous when you order them all together - rose loukoum (loukoum is another word for Turkish delight, but this one is fairly delicate), Earl Grey and pistachio halvah make such a pretty cone. The ginger cookies (not the ginger snaps, you want the thin, buttery cookies) are also game-changing, and Nayla is an impressive businesswoman. Look out for an interview with her in August when she comes to New York. In the Gefinor building in Clemenceau.

Nayla, in black, and Anissa. These are two generous, charming, hilarious and wonderful women - as well as serious businesswomen and foodies.

Syria

al-Malak: This small shop sells delicious, smooth French custard-y style ice cream, not typical thick, gummy Arabic ice cream. The owner trained somewhere in Europe (I believe it was France, not Italy) and makes a wonderful coffee flavor ("Nescafe" is the actual name) that tastes like Haagen-Dazs only less rich, and another very special flavor called Mann wa Salwa, which is a type of Iranian nougat flavored with cardamom and studded with pistachios. This ice cream is the frozen manifestation of that combination - cardamom-scented base with delicious Syrian pistachios. It is best taken with a scoop of their praline flavor. The waffle cones are also fresh, crispy and sweet. If it weren't for the grouchy chain-smoking man who works the register (the chain-smoking may be a thing of the past thanks to Syria's smoking ban) this place would be perfect. It's on Sharia Nazem Basha, the main street of the Muhajireen neighborhood. Watch out for the three to five really mediocre ice cream places on this street. Only accept al-Malak.

Dimashq: Most guidebooks suggest Bakdash in the covered market of Souq al-Hamediyya (it's the place that's mobbed with Syrian teenagers, families, and Swedish backpackers) but just down the street, a bit closer to the entrance of the souq, is Dimashq. Bakdash is one of those places that someone once thought was good and no one else thought to question. It is assuredly not that good. Dimashq, on the other hand, is extremely good, notably for its ishta flavor (my friend and world-class food writer Anissa Helou first took me there.)

This picture was taken by my dear friend James Alexander, who sadly didn't have this valuable blog as a resource when he traveled to Damascus and wound up in the wrong hands.

At Dimashq, they make ice cream either from ishta (the cream that floats on top of really fresh milk) or of regular milk, ("hlib" flavor, hlib being Arabic for milk.) The ishta flavor is like an unflavored, incredibly smooth kulfi, with a pure dairy flavor, while the milk is lighter, and seems to have more gum arabic or thickener in it. You know it's authentic when you see a middle-aged Khaliji (a person from the Khalij, or Gulf region) there with his miserable-looking child bride, as though an ice cream will make up for the inequality in their relationship. Some realities are too unhappy even for ice cream to fix.