Not so long ago, deluxe ice cream meant a Viennetta. Now it could be a scoop that tastes the way that cut grass smells. Tim Lewis charts the artisan reinvention of the world's favourite comfort food
In the (not especially good) film The Place Beyond the Pines, Ryan Gosling plays a motorbike stunt rider called Handsome Luke who finds out he has fathered a child without knowing it. This is shocking news but Luke is particularly taken aback by a subsequent revelation that the boy, now aged one, has never tasted ice cream. He may not be much of a father, but Luke determines then and there that the kid is going to have himself a cone. "I'm going to look in his face when he tries ice cream," he declares. "Every time he has ice cream for the rest of his life, he's going to see my fucking face."
Can you imagine this scene with any other food? Doughnuts can be incredible, but no one records a child's first doughnut for posterity. Perhaps some people can track key moments in life through their doughnut consumption, but unless it's Homer Simpson, I don't know them. Yet ice cream does do something funny to a lot of us: it makes us nostalgic and happy and, if you take your cues from Bridget Jones, it helps us recover from heartbreak. The world is more colourful, slower-paced and simply more fun with an ice cream.
There are a few reasons why this is the case. We are particularly conditioned to like foods that change texture in our mouths: as ice cream melts from solid to liquid, it keeps our brains interested. When you lick an ice cream, the emulsion covers all the sensors of your tongue, from back to front, making your taste buds sing with sweet, savoury and sharp sensations. It is easy to digest and places very low on something called the satiety index, which means you can eat a lot without feeling unpleasantly full.
There's more good news: until now, we have basically been eating the crap stuff. Britain's greatest contribution to global ice-cream culture has been the popularisation of soft serve. Whether this highly aerated, minimally nutritious confection was actually invented in the United States or here remains fiercely contested, though sadly the myth that Margaret Thatcher was involved in its creation while working as a research chemist at the food conglomerate J Lyons & Co has been fairly thoroughly debunked.
Still, beyond Mr Whippy, we have recently started to develop a rich and fulfilling ice-cream culture. Heston Blumenthal, who famously served bacon-and-egg ice cream at his restaurant The Fat Duck, has made a range of marginally less insane ice creams for Waitrose for a while now. Artisan makers are popping up all over the country: Gelupo, Sorbitium Ices and La Grotta Ices in London, Ginger's Comfort Emporium in Manchester and Affogato in Edinburgh being among the more ambitious. Camden's Chin Chin Laboratorists is the first liquid nitrogen ice-cream parlour in Europe. It serves Pondicherry vanilla, 80% Valrhona chocolate and a guest flavour that in July was "ice cream that tastes of the smell of green grass".
If you must count calories, there are promising developments, too. The R&D team at Unilever, the British-Dutch behemoth that makes 40% of the ice creams we eat in the UK – Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, Cornetto and Carte D'Or among them – has invested heavily to create products that are both healthier and creamier. Some of the terminology sounds slightly terrifying. "Ice-structuring protein" creates an increased number of smaller ice crystals and enables a lower fat content. A process known as "patented single screw cold extruder technology" reduces air bubbles and maintains a smooth texture. However, part of the indulgence of eating ice cream is not thinking too hard about how it's made. At least it doesn't contain whale fat, which was legal until the 80s.
So, our favourite food is becoming weirder, tastier and, when made the right way, it almost qualifies as nutritious. And finally, after washouts for two years, we have had a decent summer that might entice us to eat it. Ice cream, let's face it, is so hot right now.
In a corner table at Chin Chin Laboratorists a customer, Katy Cartwright, sits with her two children, Clementine, aged three, and Buzz, 11 months. Clementine first visited the shop, which is outfitted like a science lab, with theatrical plumes of vapour erupting from a large nitrogen canister, when she was not quite six months old. She had her first taste of ice cream here and is now sitting in front of a huge bowl of Royal Birthday Cake ice cream, in honour of Prince George, with elderflower and raspberry jelly and a light shower of honeycomb. Her brother has the dairy-free apricot and jasmine sorbet.
The ice creams are made while you wait, by adding a shot of liquid nitrogen to a custard base: the mixture freezes instantly and creates a smooth, intense scoop with almost no ice crystals. "We love the texture and the innovative flavours," says Katy, who comes to Chin Chin once a week. "It's worth using up your sweet allowance on."
Most ice-cream makers agree there is something rather special about watching a child taste it for the first time. "When friends have babies, I take ice cream to their houses," says Kitty Travers, who runs La Grotta Ices, a hole-in-the-wall in Bermondsey, south London. "It's really funny to watch: you can see – 'Ping!' It's instant, they love it. It must be like mother's milk: the ice cream replicates the natural sweetness of breast milk."
Some edgier manufacturers have made this connection specifically. Matt O'Connor from London's The Icecreamists created a flavour called Baby GooGoo in 2011 made from undiluted breast milk and sold it for £14 a serving. (He was also responsible for Sex Pistol, flecked with Viagra.) Peta even lobbied Ben & Jerry's to use breast milk to reduce the suffering of cows, but the company opted to stick with its Vermont dairy.
While it seems we have a natural inclination to love ice cream, most of us are not too picky about how we take our fix. If you were growing up in the 70s and 80s, you probably moved without loyalty or much discernment between choc ices and Neapolitan blocks at home and a 99 Flake whenever you were in earshot of the melodious tinkling of Greensleeves. When you had guests or a special occasion, a Viennetta. But that all changed with the arrival of Häagen-Dazs – specifically the Belgian chocolate flavour – in the mid-80s.
Only years later would we find out the truth about Häagen-Dazs: that it was created by Reuben Mattus, a Polish-American who invented the name in 1961. He thought it evoked Scandinavian milkmaids and early cartons featured a map of Denmark. (Danish doesn't even have umlauts!) But by then it was too late: we were all ice-cream snobs. Ben & Jerry's rocked up soon after with packaging so wacky that we didn't notice that its contents – from Phish Food (chocolate ice cream with marshmallow, caramel) to Caramel Chew Chew (caramel ice cream with chocolate bits) – all tasted the same.
The top end of the market remains the fastest growth area for ice cream in the UK. In the year ending September 2012, the luxury sector grew by 7% to £146m, and this did not include small independent operations. There is also significant potential to expand. Each year, British people consume on average around seven litres of ice cream – spending £17 in the process. This is just a quarter of what they eat in New Zealand, the world leaders, and less than almost every country in Europe. Even Finland, not known for its balmy summers, sells double the amount of ice cream.
"I find that British people don't eat ice cream below 14C," says Travers from La Grotta Ices. "I always look at the weather and the temperature and if it's not over 14C, it's not worth it. I think that's when it stops melting in your mouth. But it's funny, because in Moscow they sell ice cream throughout the winter in minus 30C.
"The other big difference is that in other countries ice cream is not just for children – it's for everybody," Travers continues. "In Italy, you'd have ice cream for breakfast: a big old brioche stuffed with ice cream that you dip into your cappuccino while you read La Gazzetta dello Sport – it's brilliant! I don't think we'll be doing that any time soon."
Another expanding market in the UK is frozen yogurt and that, curiously, we do seem happy to eat year-round. If ice cream was less calorific, would we consume more of it? Opinions vary: after all, part of the fun of ice cream is that it is an illicit treat. Anyway, many of the small-batch manufacturers are naturally producing a more wholesome end product. La Grotta Ices – whose flavours currently include peach leaf with raspberry ripple and mulberry granita –is typically made from organic milk, free-range eggs and up to 50% fresh whole fruit, plus a dash of cream.
At Chin Chin Laboratorists, the ice cream is made with around half the usual fat and sugar because the mixture does not require as much butter fat due to the lower prevalence of ice crystals. "We don't brag about the health benefits because we don't need to," says Ahrash Akbari-Kalhur, who runs the store with his wife, Nyisha Weber. "It's the same with the nitrogen: it has an appeal initially but our regular customers are coming for the flavour and the texture."
The message is: get ready to eat more ice cream. We are already starting to see some soft-serve machines being repurposed to produce a tasty, natural product rather than the mix of thickeners, stabilisers and emulsifiers we are used to. Also, expect a boom in liquid-nitrogen parlours and one day – when a boffin works out how to transport and store it – nitro ice cream in supermarkets. As Akbari-Kalhur points out, it is actually a British invention: "instant" ice cream made with "liquid air" was first showcased in 1901 by Agnes B Marshall, the great cookery writer of her day, in a demonstration at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Not long afterwards she fell from a horse and died, and the technique was lost for 90-odd years.
Surely it's about time that we give Mrs Marshall her due and make amends to the world for Mr Whippy. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
In the (not especially good) film The Place Beyond the Pines, Ryan Gosling plays a motorbike stunt rider called Handsome Luke who finds out he has fathered a child without knowing it. This is shocking news but Luke is particularly taken aback by a subsequent revelation that the boy, now aged one, has never tasted ice cream. He may not be much of a father, but Luke determines then and there that the kid is going to have himself a cone. "I'm going to look in his face when he tries ice cream," he declares. "Every time he has ice cream for the rest of his life, he's going to see my fucking face."
Can you imagine this scene with any other food? Doughnuts can be incredible, but no one records a child's first doughnut for posterity. Perhaps some people can track key moments in life through their doughnut consumption, but unless it's Homer Simpson, I don't know them. Yet ice cream does do something funny to a lot of us: it makes us nostalgic and happy and, if you take your cues from Bridget Jones, it helps us recover from heartbreak. The world is more colourful, slower-paced and simply more fun with an ice cream.
There are a few reasons why this is the case. We are particularly conditioned to like foods that change texture in our mouths: as ice cream melts from solid to liquid, it keeps our brains interested. When you lick an ice cream, the emulsion covers all the sensors of your tongue, from back to front, making your taste buds sing with sweet, savoury and sharp sensations. It is easy to digest and places very low on something called the satiety index, which means you can eat a lot without feeling unpleasantly full.
There's more good news: until now, we have basically been eating the crap stuff. Britain's greatest contribution to global ice-cream culture has been the popularisation of soft serve. Whether this highly aerated, minimally nutritious confection was actually invented in the United States or here remains fiercely contested, though sadly the myth that Margaret Thatcher was involved in its creation while working as a research chemist at the food conglomerate J Lyons & Co has been fairly thoroughly debunked.
Still, beyond Mr Whippy, we have recently started to develop a rich and fulfilling ice-cream culture. Heston Blumenthal, who famously served bacon-and-egg ice cream at his restaurant The Fat Duck, has made a range of marginally less insane ice creams for Waitrose for a while now. Artisan makers are popping up all over the country: Gelupo, Sorbitium Ices and La Grotta Ices in London, Ginger's Comfort Emporium in Manchester and Affogato in Edinburgh being among the more ambitious. Camden's Chin Chin Laboratorists is the first liquid nitrogen ice-cream parlour in Europe. It serves Pondicherry vanilla, 80% Valrhona chocolate and a guest flavour that in July was "ice cream that tastes of the smell of green grass".
If you must count calories, there are promising developments, too. The R&D team at Unilever, the British-Dutch behemoth that makes 40% of the ice creams we eat in the UK – Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, Cornetto and Carte D'Or among them – has invested heavily to create products that are both healthier and creamier. Some of the terminology sounds slightly terrifying. "Ice-structuring protein" creates an increased number of smaller ice crystals and enables a lower fat content. A process known as "patented single screw cold extruder technology" reduces air bubbles and maintains a smooth texture. However, part of the indulgence of eating ice cream is not thinking too hard about how it's made. At least it doesn't contain whale fat, which was legal until the 80s.
So, our favourite food is becoming weirder, tastier and, when made the right way, it almost qualifies as nutritious. And finally, after washouts for two years, we have had a decent summer that might entice us to eat it. Ice cream, let's face it, is so hot right now.
In a corner table at Chin Chin Laboratorists a customer, Katy Cartwright, sits with her two children, Clementine, aged three, and Buzz, 11 months. Clementine first visited the shop, which is outfitted like a science lab, with theatrical plumes of vapour erupting from a large nitrogen canister, when she was not quite six months old. She had her first taste of ice cream here and is now sitting in front of a huge bowl of Royal Birthday Cake ice cream, in honour of Prince George, with elderflower and raspberry jelly and a light shower of honeycomb. Her brother has the dairy-free apricot and jasmine sorbet.
The ice creams are made while you wait, by adding a shot of liquid nitrogen to a custard base: the mixture freezes instantly and creates a smooth, intense scoop with almost no ice crystals. "We love the texture and the innovative flavours," says Katy, who comes to Chin Chin once a week. "It's worth using up your sweet allowance on."
Most ice-cream makers agree there is something rather special about watching a child taste it for the first time. "When friends have babies, I take ice cream to their houses," says Kitty Travers, who runs La Grotta Ices, a hole-in-the-wall in Bermondsey, south London. "It's really funny to watch: you can see – 'Ping!' It's instant, they love it. It must be like mother's milk: the ice cream replicates the natural sweetness of breast milk."
Some edgier manufacturers have made this connection specifically. Matt O'Connor from London's The Icecreamists created a flavour called Baby GooGoo in 2011 made from undiluted breast milk and sold it for £14 a serving. (He was also responsible for Sex Pistol, flecked with Viagra.) Peta even lobbied Ben & Jerry's to use breast milk to reduce the suffering of cows, but the company opted to stick with its Vermont dairy.
While it seems we have a natural inclination to love ice cream, most of us are not too picky about how we take our fix. If you were growing up in the 70s and 80s, you probably moved without loyalty or much discernment between choc ices and Neapolitan blocks at home and a 99 Flake whenever you were in earshot of the melodious tinkling of Greensleeves. When you had guests or a special occasion, a Viennetta. But that all changed with the arrival of Häagen-Dazs – specifically the Belgian chocolate flavour – in the mid-80s.
Only years later would we find out the truth about Häagen-Dazs: that it was created by Reuben Mattus, a Polish-American who invented the name in 1961. He thought it evoked Scandinavian milkmaids and early cartons featured a map of Denmark. (Danish doesn't even have umlauts!) But by then it was too late: we were all ice-cream snobs. Ben & Jerry's rocked up soon after with packaging so wacky that we didn't notice that its contents – from Phish Food (chocolate ice cream with marshmallow, caramel) to Caramel Chew Chew (caramel ice cream with chocolate bits) – all tasted the same.
The top end of the market remains the fastest growth area for ice cream in the UK. In the year ending September 2012, the luxury sector grew by 7% to £146m, and this did not include small independent operations. There is also significant potential to expand. Each year, British people consume on average around seven litres of ice cream – spending £17 in the process. This is just a quarter of what they eat in New Zealand, the world leaders, and less than almost every country in Europe. Even Finland, not known for its balmy summers, sells double the amount of ice cream.
"I find that British people don't eat ice cream below 14C," says Travers from La Grotta Ices. "I always look at the weather and the temperature and if it's not over 14C, it's not worth it. I think that's when it stops melting in your mouth. But it's funny, because in Moscow they sell ice cream throughout the winter in minus 30C.
"The other big difference is that in other countries ice cream is not just for children – it's for everybody," Travers continues. "In Italy, you'd have ice cream for breakfast: a big old brioche stuffed with ice cream that you dip into your cappuccino while you read La Gazzetta dello Sport – it's brilliant! I don't think we'll be doing that any time soon."
Another expanding market in the UK is frozen yogurt and that, curiously, we do seem happy to eat year-round. If ice cream was less calorific, would we consume more of it? Opinions vary: after all, part of the fun of ice cream is that it is an illicit treat. Anyway, many of the small-batch manufacturers are naturally producing a more wholesome end product. La Grotta Ices – whose flavours currently include peach leaf with raspberry ripple and mulberry granita –is typically made from organic milk, free-range eggs and up to 50% fresh whole fruit, plus a dash of cream.
At Chin Chin Laboratorists, the ice cream is made with around half the usual fat and sugar because the mixture does not require as much butter fat due to the lower prevalence of ice crystals. "We don't brag about the health benefits because we don't need to," says Ahrash Akbari-Kalhur, who runs the store with his wife, Nyisha Weber. "It's the same with the nitrogen: it has an appeal initially but our regular customers are coming for the flavour and the texture."
The message is: get ready to eat more ice cream. We are already starting to see some soft-serve machines being repurposed to produce a tasty, natural product rather than the mix of thickeners, stabilisers and emulsifiers we are used to. Also, expect a boom in liquid-nitrogen parlours and one day – when a boffin works out how to transport and store it – nitro ice cream in supermarkets. As Akbari-Kalhur points out, it is actually a British invention: "instant" ice cream made with "liquid air" was first showcased in 1901 by Agnes B Marshall, the great cookery writer of her day, in a demonstration at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Not long afterwards she fell from a horse and died, and the technique was lost for 90-odd years.
Surely it's about time that we give Mrs Marshall her due and make amends to the world for Mr Whippy. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.