The Ice Cream Cookbooks of Summer Are Here
An ice cream cookbook holds an implicit promise: We’re going to have fun. Ice cream, in its many permutations, is arguably the most fun food we have: It is childhood, it is summer, it is a rainbow that melts on your tongue and down your arm. But actually making ice cream? That, at least according […]
An ice cream cookbook holds an implicit promise: We’re going to have fun. Ice cream, in its many permutations, is arguably the most fun food we have: It is childhood, it is summer, it is a rainbow that melts on your tongue and down your arm.
But actually making ice cream? That, at least according to Nick Morgenstern, is a different story. “…I am not going to tell you to have fun,” he writes at the end of the introduction to his new cookbook, Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream. “Eating ice cream is fun. Making it is serious business.”
Morgenstern’s is one of three new ice cream books to be bestowed upon us in time for ice cream season (though as we true ice cream freaks know, ice cream is every season). In March, Pooja Bavishi published Malai: Frozen Desserts Inspired by South Asian Flavors; a month later, Tyler Malek followed with Salt & Straw: America’s Most Iconic Ice Creams, written with JJ Goode. Morgenstern, Bavishi, and Malek are the owners of successful ice cream establishments: Morgenstern has two eponymous shops in Manhattan; Bavishi’s Malai is a well-loved draw in Brooklyn; and Malek, the co-founder of Salt & Straw, now presides over a growing network of storefronts in several major metropolitan areas.
Ice cream says a lot about the personality of its maker, so it follows that ice cream cookbooks do, too. Opening one is a little like going on a first date: Will you find connection here? Is this relationship material or a quick, unsatisfying fling? Will you feel supported, shown a good time, made to want to learn? The same can be said for any cookbook and its author, really, but ice cream is special: If it’s a food that evokes simplicity and innocence, it’s also one that comes with an intimidating learning curve. As someone who has made a fair amount of ice cream at home, I didn’t feel intimidated; I just wanted to know if these books would make good and wise companions.
I started out with Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Creams. Glutton for punishment that I am, I was drawn in by the whiff of proactive disapproval in its author’s tone — how dare you think this is going to be fun, you simp? — but also, full disclosure, because several years ago Nick Morgenstern took me to lunch to discuss the possibility of co-writing this very book. Nothing came of it; Morgenstern appears to have written the book without a co-writer, and his tone will likely be familiar to anyone who’s visited his flagship shop in Lower Manhattan. The ice cream he serves is very, very good, but there’s a ramrod perfectionism that underscores the immaculate white-tiled space.
That air defines the book. I say that with a certain admiration: Again, making ice cream can be tricky business, so it can be helpful to have someone tell you to do this and absolutely not that. That said, Morgenstern isn’t here to hold your hand. Consider the recipe for his salted caramel pretzel ice cream recipe: Cook “the caramel as far as it can possibly go before it becomes burnt or even slightly bitter,” he writes. “This can only really be achieved through practice.” There are basic guidelines for making caramel, but it’s really up to you to figure it out.
This is a book of strongly held opinions. “Life in NYC has deluded its residents into believing that the Union Square farmers’ market is amazing,” Morgenstern writes in his introduction to strawberry ice cream. “Is it better than the Soviet-style shopping experience of supermarket chains…? Sure, but it does not compare to the farmers’ markets in France, California, or Tokyo.” The hot fudge sundae, meanwhile, is The Most Important Sundae in America (fair); the quality of a scoop shop’s vanilla ice cream will “tell you everything you need to know” about the shop’s quality (also fair); vegan food “is annoying,” an “unnecessary obstacle on the road to deliciousness” (unfair, and also prehistoric). I appreciate these opinions, even if I disagree with them: Give me a cookbook with personality any day. I was less appreciative of the book’s photos of the ice cream itself, staged as it is to look less like a food you’d want to eat and more like an installation that should be sitting on the floor of DIA: Beacon with a title card next to it.
And the ice cream recipes? Delightful in both abundance and variety. Morgenstern likes iterating on a theme. So he provides six types of vanilla ice cream, five each of chocolate, banana, and strawberry, innumerable spins on tropical flavors, nuts, and caramel, and a rogue’s gallery of both classics and wild cards like french fry, burnt sage, and tahini and jelly.
Morgenstern mostly doesn’t use eggs in his ice cream — they get in the way of the ice cream’s flavor, he explains — or a ton of sugar. In the s’mores recipe, the sweetness comes from only a half-cup sugar, a small dose of glucose syrup (which also helps create a smooth texture), and marshmallows, the latter of which you toast and broil (I blow-torched mine) and then blend into the hot ice cream base. Sounds complicated but isn’t, really; this is where Morgenstern’s straightforward, no-nonsense style really sings. I wound up with a supremely smooth, not-too-sweet scoop that really does taste like a s’more, and even if Morgenstern insists — as he does in the book’s introduction — that there “is absolutely no screaming for ice cream,” I, for one, think that’s worth shouting over.
From Morgenstern I went to Malai. The name of both her book and shop, Bavishi writes, comes from “one of my favorite food words since I was a kid. It’s the cream that I would steal from the top of the milk when my parents were not looking.” Having grown up in the U.S. as the child of Indian immigrants, she continues, she uses ice cream as a “platform to express my whole self,” and to “tell the stories of what it was like for me to embrace the Indian flavors in my suburban American upbringing.” Thus, the book is full of recipes that incorporate traditionally South Asian flavors: there’s ice cream flavored with turmeric, masala chai, jaggery, fenugreek, hawla, and gulab jamun, shrikhand frozen yogurt, cardamom kulfi ice pops, and nimbu pani sorbet.
A sense of warmth pervades Bavishi’s book; unlike Morgenstern, she wants you to have fun. Family is also a constant presence: a photo of Bavishi and her parents opens the book; her mother’s dudh keri, a summertime dessert, shows up in the headnote for mango and cream ice cream; a disastrous white chocolate cheesecake she made as a child resurfaces as inspiration for a flavor. And carrot halwa ice cream is on Malai’s menu, she explains, because her father will only eat his carrot halwa (a carrot pudding) with a scoop of vanilla.
Ice cream, in Bavishi’s portrayal, is a romp — to talk about, to make, to eat. In this sense, it’s more of a traditional ice cream book than Morgenstern’s, which makes its emphasis on non-traditional flavors (at least to the average white American palate) even more refreshing.
Like Morgenstern, Bavishi doesn’t use eggs in her ice cream base; instead, there’s a bit of cornstarch for thickener, along with milk, cream, honey, sugar, and cream cheese. The cream cheese lends the base a pleasant tang and cuts its sweetness, though even without it, the base is far from cloying. I was initially wary of using cornstarch in the base, as it can create a chalky flavor, but in the jaggery ice cream recipe, it created a noticeably thick, rich texture. The recipe is dead simple — you just add powdered jaggery to the base, then cook, chill, churn, and enjoy — but results in exceptional flavor, with a depth and warmth to its sweetness, and the cream cheese provides a refreshing counterpoint. I can see eating this throughout the summer, topped with a few Luxardo cherries. And since I bought about a pound of jaggery, I will.
Last I went to Salt & Straw: America’s Most Iconic Ice Creams. Born in Portland, Oregon, the ice cream chain has become synonymous with innovative — detractors might say over the top — flavors and mix-ins; it’s the type of place that uses ice cream as a vessel for bone marrow, black olive brittle, and caramelized turkey with cranberry sauce (not all together, but never say never). In this cookbook, the company’s second, Tyler Malek acknowledges his proclivity towards the unconventional. “[W]e’ve always avoided making the classics,” he writes. “That is, until now.” This book is dedicated to “the epic Salt & Straw version of 10 of the country’s most famous flavors.”
Malek prefaces his recipes for chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, coffee, pistachio, and green tea with a breakdown of the different kinds of ice cream makers (Morgenstern does this too), as well as recipes for different bases: custard, gelato, sorbet, ice cream, and coconut. He also includes a sidebar about how to serve ice cream, something that may initially read as a “no shit” moment but is actually informative and oddly moving. “The thing is,” he explains, “at our shops we put so much care into our scoops, we want you to experience them at their best.”
Malek is a true ice cream freak, and I ate that enthusiasm right up. Tell me the ratio of water to fat to milk solids to sugar in your ice cream base! Regale me with a discussion of why you use xantham gum in there! Speak to me of the 220 flavor compounds found in a vanilla bean!
The book’s claim to provide the classics is a true one, but, well, Malek is going to Malek. Yes, there’s a recipe for French vanilla, but there’s also smoked cherry vanilla and vanilla with sticky croissants and caramel swirl. There’s chocolate chocolate chip, but it’s a prelude to a Wonka-like tidal wave of black pepper goat cheese ganache, chile crisp chocolate peanut butter cup, and fig and sesame peanut butter cup. And green tea? Why stop at matcha when you can have chocolate earl grey and lemon shortbread, or smoked black tea with black sesame marshmallows?
This book is a bit like a fun house, insofar as it distorts your idea of what reality can and should be. I had a particularly hard time deciding what to make, but finally settled on bananas foster rum caramel. This is, not incidentally, one of the book’s vegan flavors. Morgenstern asserts that vanilla is the true test of an ice cream shop’s mettle, but I’d argue that the quality of its vegan scoops are equally important.
Malek’s vegan base is made of coconut cream, a scant half-cup sugar, xantham gum, and light corn syrup. From there you heat, chill, and freeze it like you would a dairy base. It’s quite creamy, and makes a good blank palette for the bananas foster rum caramel. The resulting ice cream was as smooth and creamy as the dairy versions I made, and altogether a real joy to eat.
“Joy” aptly sums up everything I made. That’s the beautiful thing about ice cream: Just as there’s something for everyone, there’s a cookbook that can answer your particular cravings and sensibility. It’s extremely democratic. It is also, with apologies to Nick Morgenstern, fun.
