New ice cream flavors anything but vanilla

by John Kessler

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 07/06/05 Jennifer Newman's teeth blacken at the first spoonful of ice cream. "Oh, my God. Ewww. I hate licorice," says the Avondale Estates shopkeeper, swallowing hard and turning her spoon to a cup of wasabi-ginger ice cream. It's another of the edgy new flavors that debuted Friday at the 20 metro locations of Cold Stone Creamery, including Newman's branch on Decatur Square. Her face brightens. "Wow! That's good. It's so spicy." She takes another spoonful and another. "So much for my low-sugar diet." Thirty-one flavors? How penurious. How quaint. 

Following a trend that could leave Messrs. Baskin and Robbins running for safe cover in a tub of French vanilla, ice cream parlors and restaurant pastry kitchens are peddling new flavors that — how to put this gently? — don't sound real. Don't sound possible. Don't sound remotely like anything you'd put atop a cone, roll in jimmies or lavish over a split banana. Think lobster. Olive and chocolate. Blue cheese. Breakfast cereal . . . 

While neighborhood shops such as Cold Stone, Bruster'sand Jake's offer up flavors like wasabi-ginger or wedding cake for a summertime lark — after all, if it's sweet, creamy and cold, what's a little Japanese mustard to get in the way? — restaurants have a different agenda. Chefs are coming up with edgy flavors to appeal to their increasingly experimental clientele, to blur the distinction of sweet and savory and to challenge the dessert menu's hegemony over the ice cream maker. 

Joël Antunes led the way back in 2001 when his namesake restaurant opened with gazpacho garnished with tomato sorbet on the menu. Since then, the combination of cool soup with cooler garnish has become a leitmotif in Atlanta dining. The Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta, takes the notion a step further, serving its soup with a tomato-Tabasco sorbet with olive oil and basil. 

Nava's gazpacho topper is positively rococo: tequila and Dijon mustard sorbet. Yes, but do they use the tequila with the worm? Speaking of booze, Antony Fernandez, executive pastry chef at Linger Longer Bar & Grill in the Ritz-Carlton Lodge, Reynolds Plantation, floats gin sorbet in tonic water as a complement to his lemon tart. That sounds like bait for the steel magnolias who frequent the lodge. All he needs is a Virginia Slim gelato to seal the deal. New ice cream flavors are being invented to give a jolt to otherwise traditional desserts. 

Pastry chef Kirk Parks of Rathbun's serves good old-fashioned strawberry shortcake . . . with a big, honking scoop of Tabasco. If you'd rather have vanilla ice cream, go ahead. But it will be crunchy with sea salt granules. 

Restaurant Eugene bakes a homey summer staple — lemon poundcake with Georgia blueberries. And that lovely pale yellow scoop on top? Uh-huh: corn. 

It makes the oatmeal raisin crunch ice cream that Rainwater in Alpharetta serves with its apple beignet sound conservative by comparison. But the real paradigm shift in dining is just how far the notion of "ice cream" has migrated to the savory side of the menu. Consider Joël, where the kitchen tops a thick chilled pea soup with a scoop of pale gold goodness. It swirls and melts, where its sweetness echoes the hint of fresh mint in the soup. But it also adds something not sweet — a strange flavor of smoke, of meat, of breakfast. Bacon. Yes, it's bacon ice cream, and it's delicious. 

Richard Blais, the new chef at One Midtown Kitchen, likes to find clever ways to churn tradition. He'll top raw oysters with a sweet/spicy dot of cocktail sorbet and serve his chunky house-made country pâté with cornichons, pickled onion and — you guessed it — mustard ice cream. In both cases the novelty serves the purpose of icy refreshment. 

Many of the advances in savory ice creams come thanks to the Pacojet — a Swiss machine that started showing up in many restaurant kitchens in the mid-'90s. Unlike traditional ice cream makers that churn air into a cold liquid base as it freezes, the Pacojet — which retails for about $3,000 — starts with a frozen-solid base and shaves it with a rotating blade into slivers that are less than 2 microns thick, thus aerating it. The ingredients don't have to be blended or strained. Users, for instance, can produce an order of pineapple sorbet in 20 seconds from frozen chunked pineapple in unsweetened juice. 

Ice creams, as chef Guenter Seeger demonstrates, don't require any sugar at all. His Pacojet sits next to the marble pastry counter in his eponymous restaurant kitchen. It stands about a foot and a half high and looks like a clunky, old coffee maker. Seeger places tiny balls of Pernod-macerated cantaloupe in the bottom of a bowl and tops that with lobster meat. He removes a metal canister from the freezer labeled "lobster"; it is half-filled with rock-hard orange ice. He snaps it into the Pacojet and pushes a button. It whirs. It whines. It lights up. And in 20 seconds it has shaved enough of the frozen base to produce one large scoop of lobster ice cream to finish the dish. "Sometimes I spin a parsley ice cream for soups," Seeger says. 

Savory ice creams "work well in the summertime because you have something really refreshing." While many of the city's top chefs use their Pacojets to push the envelope, others have no use for either the fancy machine or the far-out flavors. Unusual ice creams are "not going to find a home on my menu," says Hugh Acheson, chef at Five and Ten in Athens. "I have to pay bills." While Acheson chooses to serve a sure-to-offend-nobody peach mint ice cream, he likes edgy flavors within reason. "If you're going to do an avocado sorbet to garnish gazpacho, that would be a classic pairing. Or if you want to do a mango and chili ice cream, that's within my idea of what food vernacular is," he cedes. "But often you see this stuff that sounds great on the menu, it sounds wowie, but often it is not very good." That said, Five and Ten is currently churning rosemary ice cream. Not exactly your grandfather's boysenberry.