kottke.org posts about ice cream
Tiger Tail ice cream is an orange ice cream with black licorice swirls generally only found in Canada (until this summer when you can get it in Somerville after I make it even though I’m not very good at swirling).
A ribbon of black licorice swirled into an orange-flavored ice cream base gives this tiger its stripes. The old-school flavor sold well in soda parlors from the 1950s to the 1970s, and many Canadians now consider it a childhood classic. As curious as it may seem, kids (and nostalgic adults) are among the biggest fans of the citrus and black licorice combination.
Tigers Blood sorbet is a sorbet with strawberry, coconut, and watermelon, and maybe we’ll make that one, too.
Depending on who you ask, Tiger’s Blood could have originated as early as the 1940s or as late as the 1990s and was invented anywhere from Hawaii to Texas. Regardless of what the true story is, it’s safe to say that its creation was a success as it remains incredibly popular across the country.
Tigers Blood is also the name of the new album by Waxahatchee.
On Tigers Blood, no bond is linear or static. Some of these songs sound ready to run, bursting from the traps; others take their ease with intoxicating beauty. Love boomerangs and comes back. Sisters have an unexpected showdown about their respective heady and cautious approaches to life.
See how it’s all come together now?
Imagine you own an ice cream shop and the thermostat on your dipping cabinet, which is the freezer ice cream is dipped (scooped) out of, is set to 4, which is too warm, and you want to make the freezer colder. Are you setting this dial to 3 or to 5 to make the freezer colder? I asked the Gracie’s followers on Instagram earlier this year and there was lots of discussion. Comment below with your answer unless you already follow Gracie’s on Instagram, in which case, zip it, buster.
Update: 7 is colder. Sorry for dragging this out so long, I’m still mad at 2006 Jason for not telling me if a plane can take off on a conveyor belt. I also forgot to tell you how the design of the thermostat for another of our freezers is even worse than the one above. It’s just a slot you turn with a Phillips screwdriver and have to guess if you’re turning it the right way. (The trick I use is to turn it when the condenser is blowing, and the direction that turns it off is “warmer.”)
Mister Softee used to dominate ice cream sales on Manhattan’s streets. Now Midtown is run by a splinter group called New York Ice Cream, former Softee franchisees (for a little while the trucks read “Master Softee”) who cut out the overhead but kept their corners.
The New York Times ran a story about the ice cream turf wars in late May:
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”
Mr. Vega, 41, said that if he comes across a rival on his route, “I jump out and say, ‘Listen young man, this is my route, you gotta get out of there.’”
The same day that story was printed, a New York Ice Cream driver was arrested for attacking a pretzel vendor in Midtown with a baseball bat.
This week, Crain’s New York had a deep-dive into the nitty-gritty of NYC food carts, from managing licenses and fees, dealing with wholesalers, appealing tickets, and paying taxes. The wholesalers run out of Hell’s Kitchen; the expediters and permit brokers are in Astoria.
A thousand and one systems, legal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal, overlapping each other like nervous and circulatory networks in a body. All of the unseen navigation that makes a city run.
From Amanda McCall, a selection of Ben & Jerry’s flavors featuring women.
McCall made these because Ben & Jerry’s hasn’t done such a good job highlighting women with their products:
Over the past three decades, Ben & Jerry’s has created over twenty flavors honoring various famous people, and only two of those people have been female: Tiny Fey’s character on 30 Rock (“Liz Lemon’s Greek Frozen Yogurt”, released in 2013 ) and Olympic snowboarder Hannah Teter (“Hannah Teter’s Maple Blondie”, released briefly in 2009).
There are currently no female flavors of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (even Tina Fey would agree that, while “Greek frozen yogurt” is certainly a healthy ice cream alternative, it is not the same as ice cream), despite the fact that women consume significantly more ice cream than men do.
The best thing about the Butter Pecancé Knowles flavor is that butter pecan ice cream is actually the singer’s favorite flavor.
“I love my butter pecan ice cream,” she says, “but I also love to work out. We all have our issues. Mine is arms and legs, keeping them tight and toned. It takes work, believe me.”
Ben & Jerry’s! Let’s make this happen! (via @amateurgourmet)
At a Boston ice cream shop, the cost of ice cream cone has risen 10% in the last four months. The Boston Globe investigated down the supply chain and detailed where the price increases are coming from.
Ice cream may be a deliciously simple combination of milk, butter, and sugar, but the true cost of an ice cream cone is no simple business calculation. Toscanini’s price tag is part of complex and increasingly interconnected world economy, one that links a dairy farm in the tiny Western Massachusetts town of Colrain to the sprawling neighborhoods of Beijing.
Also of note: pistachio ice cream might be difficult to find this summer because the cost of pistachios has increased sharply in recent months. (via girlhacker)
In last Sunday’s episode of Mad Men, Grandpa Gene ate ice cream right out of the container and salted each spoonful before putting it in his mouth.
It was an odd sight…salt isn’t normally the first thing you think of as an ice cream topping. After the episode, Rex Sorgatz tweeted:
WHO THE FUCK SALTS THEIR ICE CREAM?
Salt has its own flavor when it’s concentrated (if you salt foods too much or eat some all by itself) but used judiciously, salt takes the natural flavor of food and enhances the intensity. To use another dairy product as an example, fresh mozzarella tastes pretty good on its own but throw a little salt on top and it’s mozzarella++. Salt makes ok food taste good and good food taste great. Along with butter, salt is the restaurant world’s secret weapon; chefs likely use way more salt than you do when you cook at home. It’s one of the reasons why restaurant food is so good.
But back to the ice cream. As food scientist Harold McGee writes, salt probably won’t make ice cream taste sweeter but will make it taste ice creamier, particularly if the ice cream is of low quality, as the store-bought variety might have been in 1963.
I’m not sure that salt makes sugar taste sweeter, but it fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It’s an important component of taste in our foods, so if it’s missing in a given dish, the dish will taste less complete or balanced. Salt also increase the volatility of some aromatic substances in food, and it enhances our perception of some aromas, so it can make the overall flavor of a food seem more intense.
So that’s why the fuck someone might want to salt their ice cream.
Ice cream is an igneous rock made up of ice, air, and sugar.
Much like igneous rocks, the same liquid mix can turn out very differently depending on what happens while it is freezing. The goal of most ice cream and sorbet is to have a smooth and creamy texture, which would be ruined by the presence of large ice crystals. To achieve this, you want to cool your ice cream so quickly that the crystals don’t have time to grow, and keep the mixture stirred up while it freezes. There’s a lot of energy involved in the transition from liquid to solid water, and a home ice cream maker can’t do the heat transfer quickly enough to keep the ice crystals small, so you have to sit there and turn the crank until your arm is sore while the mixture slowly freezes (or invest in a fancier machine that will do the stirring for you).
See also what happens when ice cream sits for too long in the freezer and the book, The Science of Ice Cream.
Ice Cream Factory smackdown in Chinatown. Same owners or will an ice cream war consume Chinatown?
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