July 19, 2019 • 25 mins
There’s a lot of debate surrounding the exact origins of everybody’s favorite frozen treat, but experts generally agree it’s been around for more than half a millennium. In this episode, Marc learns all about ice cream’s power to tell a story through flavor from Ample Hills founders Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna. He’s also joined by his friend, chef Scott Conant, who explains how ice cream fits into fine dining and dishes on its delicious Italian cousins: gelato and sorbetto.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. Really, what determines whether you're making good
ice cream or not, like in most food, is what
the ingredients are that are going into the machine. Where
as much of a bakery as we are an ice
cream factory. You're walking around Rome and you get some
of that great celato and a little cup with a spoon.
(00:22):
It's not overly frozen, and I think that palatability is
really the key. Welcome to Food three sixty, the podcast
that serves up some serious of food for thought. I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know me
as a chef and a New York restaurateur. Today you're
in for a treat. We're going to talk all about
ice cream. That was Brian Smith, Jackie Couscuna, and Scott
(00:47):
Cohen you heard at the start of the show. All
of my guests today can speak with authority on the
magical world of professional ice cream making. I first spoke
to Brian Smith and Jackie Couscuna, owners of one of
New York's most popular ice crea spots, Ample Hills Creamery.
Making ice cream was always just a fun hobby for
the couple, but it wasn't until two thousand and ten,
(01:07):
when Brian faced some work struggles that he decided to
chase after his dream of opening up an ice cream shop.
Just four days after they opened their doors to the
first brick and mortar store, Brian and Jackie ran out
of all hundred and thirty gallons of ice cream and
were forced to close for nine days. Since then, Ample
Hills popularity has only grown. It's been rated the gats
(01:27):
number one ice cream in New York City, named the
best ice cream in America by the Food Network, and
has been an Oprah's coveted list of Favorite Things. Well,
Brian and Jackie, thank you very much for joining me
here today. Thanks. So let's hear how ample Hills began.
Jackie you were a school teacher and Brian, you were
producing audio books and writing monster movies. Yeah. Really, I
(01:51):
was the one obsessed with ice cream. My palette never
really started expanding after the age of seven, and so
ice cream was just this thing that I was in
love with from childhood and would make ice cream and
found myself making ice cream as a creative outlet from
my day job, which was a creative outlet because I
was a screenwriter. So that started to tell me that
(02:11):
maybe something was wrong with the screenwriting. And I'm honestly,
I make better ice cream than I wrote screenplays. Well,
there you go. You went with the positive that it
was the setup, like in the apartment, so you're teaching,
you come home the kitchens full of ice cream when
you get home. Yes, he would make ice cream flavors
and like kind of ridiculous ones where I would taste
them and say absolutely not, Like he did a you
(02:32):
who flavor? Do you remember that one? Yeah? That was
with Eminem's rolls. Oh that was horrible. It didn't make
the menu. I guess. We started actually with using a
hand cranked ice cream maker up in the Adirondacks in
a cabin in the woods, because every August my family
would go up to the ad Aroundecks and the same
(02:54):
cabin community for like, I think it's been over forty
years now and I've been going for twenty years, and
so a weight in to her parents, you know, to
bring my ice cream maker. And it really was as
ideentic as it sounds. We'd sit on the porch and
we'd crank ice cream. And as we started to get
the notion, Hey, maybe we should turn this into a business.
Then we would gather people around have them try the
(03:15):
ice cream, test it out. There was a lot of
that kind of trial and error. And what's the secret
to making good ice cream at home? What is the secret?
Brian not Rolls will tell you that one secret is
the machine that you're using. And so as messy as
it is, a hand cranked ice cream maker, and this
is a little technical, but it actually makes ice cream
faster than one of the newfangled ones that has a
(03:39):
compressor that you pluck into the wall. And the reason
for that is that that compressor can't drop the temperature
of your liquid ice cream mix and turn it into
a solid as quickly as the combination of ice and
rock salt. There's something chemical that happens with the rock
salt and the ice that lowers that freezing point really quickly.
And the faster you freeze ice cream, the smaller the
(03:59):
ice crystals are in the ice cream, and therefore the
smoother and creamier the ice cream. So even though it's
messier and it's been around for a hundred and fifty years,
the hand cranked ice cream maker is the way to go.
Plus it's just more fun. I used to make this
ice cream when I worked in the pastry department and
a one star missing restaurant in Paris, and we used
to turn our ice creams before service for lunch and
before service for dinner, so they were at the optimal temperature.
(04:21):
And we use this old machine. They used to have
any freeze on the outside those no and I had
this big stick I had just stick in there to
pull it out. It was a real pain in the body.
Same concept. I don't think they used the anti freeze
anymore at a commercial level. Now they make ice cream
the same way. It's just a much much more powerful compressor.
You started in two thousand eleven. Now you've got stores
(04:42):
in l A, Florida, New Jersey, New York. So do
you make everything at each shop or do you make
it in one place. Well, now that we have our factory,
we make everything there in Red Hook and then we
ship it to all our other shops. But we started
with just one on Vanderbilt Avenue and Prospect Heights, and
then when that took off, we realized that we had
a tiny little kitchen there. I think it was like
(05:03):
hundred seventy square feet and then we opened another shop
with a bigger kitchen, and then we realized that we
had to scale up even more and back to the bank. Yeah. Yeah,
Basically you were just talking about those new machines that
you have. But is there some way or what do
you do to make it still feel like it's a
local homemade ice cream? Yeah? I think ultimately there's a
(05:23):
bit of a myth around what that means to be
homemade or to be small batch. The machinery itself doesn't
determine the quality of the product. I mean, if anything,
the machinery that we're using now is better than the
machinery that we were using at the beginning because it
turns things faster and smoother and quicker. Really, what determines
whether you're making good ice cream or not, like in
(05:45):
most food, is what the ingredients are that are going
into the machine. You know. The reason that mass produced
gets a bad name is that most times when people
get up to mass produce, they cut all the costs,
they get poorer ingredients, and they shove it down into
the pipe. But as we've gotten we can gain some
efficiencies by buying paletts of sugar at a time. But
we're not buying worset sugar, We're not buying worse cream.
(06:07):
We're putting the same products into the machinery, so we're
getting the same problem. You're keeping it, keeping it real.
And we also we make everything from scrap the bakery,
that's right. I mean, we're as much of a bakery
as we are an ice cream factory. So we bake
all of our mixings are gooey, our baked on baked cookies,
everything in house, which is very different because there aren't
(06:29):
that many ice cream companies that a have as many
mixings I think as we do. We're not called ample
for nothing and then be just that does it themselves.
You can buy a lot of those pre made mixings
from companies that sell them to ice cream companies, kids
and things like exactly. Although we're not opposed to kit cats,
(06:49):
they have a place just not in you who ice cream.
So let's talk about marketing. I know you've done certain
like limited editions for certain events like the royal wedding
or the presidential elections, and then you also do things
with Marvel and with Disney. I've heard you do the
Star Wars ice cream. We really love to find ways
to tell actual narrative stories with ice cream, and you know,
(07:10):
and clearly it comes from some of my background of
trying to write screenplays and write movies, and so we've
looked for whether it's things that are licensed material like
Star Wars, we did, Mickey Mouse, We're working on Marvel
right now. We're telling our own stories, our own versions
of those things through ice cream flavors. What's the story
and that's how we turn it into an ice cream flavor.
(07:31):
So let's say the history of ice cream. I was
reading a little bit about it, and I guess you know,
ice cream was really for rich people because it was
expensive to freeze things. Do you know much about how
it became so central to American life? Ice cream is
an American concept. Really starts to happen for public consumption
around the turn of the century of the World's Fair
and St. Louis in nineteen o four, the advent of
(07:55):
the waffle cone or the ice cream cone, and ice
cream then became a more popular pedestrian enterprise as opposed
to the product of the wealthy. And a lot of
that had to do with the machinery that could then
make it, and refrigeration and that sort of thing. I mean,
the really interesting thing around Prohibition that really was the
advent of ice cream. Soda fountains, bars closed down exactly,
(08:19):
and so the American populace flooded to soda fountains and
getting phosp fates and ice cream and the soda parlor.
That kind of concept really got a boon from prohibition.
So they were instead of getting an alcohol high, they
were getting our Americans had to get high somewhere. And
how do you come up with new flavors? I think
the storytelling is probably the biggest part. Sometimes it's led
(08:42):
by ingredients. Sometimes we have contests online where we ask
people to create their own flavors and name them. The
key for us is to make flavors that are playful
and whimsical. We have a very artisanal product. We make
everything from scratch, but we're not a one ice cream shop.
We're not making goat cheese and miso ice cream or
(09:03):
saffron ice cream. We're making ice cream aimed at kids,
and more importantly kids inside of adults. And so when
we think about flavors, we think about things that are
going to trigger that moment of nostalgia, you know. We
think of it as little time machines. Honestly, that's really
what we're aiming for. I've obviously being a chef, and
I've made recipes some that I'm like, Okay, this one's
(09:23):
gonna kill it. This is my favorite dish and it
just completely flops. Have you had one of those? Yeah?
What's that said? Yes? Yes, of course we have to
talk about it. Yes, yes, this is Brian's brilliant idea.
Wasn't it you who won? Because we hadn't had a shop,
you're already getting the blame. This was once we opened
(09:43):
the shop. We had a flavor called the Beer mun
Cheese And so basically, you know how um, beer and
cheddar go together, right becauld you make a fun do
and you know how you then dip apples into that
beer cheddar fun do and that really goes together. But
nobody ever thought of beer and apple and cheddar ice cream.
So basically this was an apple lambic ice cream, So
(10:06):
an apple beer flavor of the ice cream. And then
we took cheese nips and cheetos and cheese pretzels and
broke them up and toss them in butter and sugar
and baked them and use that as the mix him, So,
how much of that did you throw out? We didn't
actually throw it at the time. We were only making
two at a time. There was one guy who probably
bought about half of it. He was upset. We never
(10:27):
brought it back, but we have one shop. You can
have a failure like the beer Munchies. Now, if we
had a failure like the beer Muntrees, it would cost
us a little more because we'd have to make a
lot more tubs. And another question, because this also happens
a flavor you've came up with it or people you're
working with and you're both like, I don't think this
is gonna work, and it totally blew you away. Like
people love it, Like do you have one of those?
(10:49):
It's called corn to Run? Corn? Yes, corn to Run.
It's a corn ice cream with swirls of blueberry and
like a corn meal crumble, and it is so insanely good.
I guess that might be my favorite flavor. Action. We
thought that was going to be like a little esoteric,
a little bit off Brandon, maybe not so popular, but
(11:10):
we have to bring it back this summer. Because we
are bringing it back and really been upset about it.
That's pretty cool. I haven't tried that one, insane. So
what's next for you guys. There's there a new flavor
that we should be sitting on the edge of our
chair waiting for. We've just launched this collaboration with Marvel,
which is super exciting because we're doing Captain America ice cream,
Black Panther ice cream, and Spiderman ice cream, and all
(11:32):
three of them we actually did original artwork and told
these origin stories that wrap around the pine containers. It's
super cool. So you have a really good relationship with
Marvel obviously, Yeah. I mean the crazy thing is it's
kind of a fun story. I mean Marvel of course
owned by Disney as his Star Wars, as was Mickey
Mouse that we also did. And all that comes from
a relationship with Bob Iger, the CEO, because he ordered
(11:54):
ice cream one day, just happened to order it online.
We shipped it to him, and maybe what two or
three days later, he emailed me and just said, hey,
I love your ice cream. If there's anything at all
I can do to help, let me know, Bob. And
so it was just one of those things that just
dropped out of the universe. And I grew up in
South Florida. I mean, we went to Disney all the
time as a kid, and so I think there was
(12:16):
a lot of that baked into the way we thought
about storytelling and ice cream and experience the way that
Disney does. And so you know, he's become a mentor
and a friend. He's visited the shops and all of
those products that we've done have been a direct relationship
from that. That's awesome. I love that you guys are
cooking something and telling stories, you know, getting together with
Marvel and Disney. It's very unique. I think that's very cool. Well,
(12:38):
Brian and Jackie, thank you so much for being here
and talking about ice cream. Thank you. Yea more on
Food three sixty right after this quick break. Welcome back
to Food three sixty. Now that we've learned something about
ice cream, I thought it would be interesting to hear
more about ice cream's Italian cousin jail out or so
(13:01):
I asked my friends Scott Khan to join me. Scott
began his food journey when he enrolled in cooking classes
at a local community college at age eleven. He went
on to attend the Culinary Institute of America, and after graduating,
he spent a year in Munich, Germany, studying pastry. After
returning to New York, Scott gained a following for his
modern take on Italian cuisine at a number of restaurants,
(13:23):
but he really put his name on the map when
he opened Limbo in two thousand two. Currently owns a
number of restaurants around the country as a fellow judge
un Chopped, and hosts Best Baker in America on Food Network. Scott,
I want to welcome you to Arizona, but I can't
really welcome you to Arizona because you actually live here now.
I do live here now. Yes, we're both here for
the Nirvana Food and Wine Festival. I'm usually in his
(13:46):
studio in New York City. This is the first time
I'm doing it off site, so I'm very excited about this.
So when you started out, you're a little kid and
you're like dreaming about what you're gonna do for the
rest of your life, and you thought cooking. Was that
your first thought? So I went to a vocational school
in water, Connecticut. I'm from a small town called Oakville
in Connecticut. If you're not sure the way vocational schools work,
basically you choose a trade. You can choose carpentry or plumbing,
(14:09):
or electrical fashion design. My first choice was plumbing, My
second choice was culinary arts, and my third choice was
hair dressing. Yeah, I mean, look at this head. And
you went into cooking because you like the outfit better
than the plumbing. Well, I couldn't get into the plumbing
program because too many people had applied, so it was
a second choice. So you were turned down from the plumbing.
(14:31):
And it told you it was because my grades weren't
good enough. But good enough to be a cook you
have to be to be a plumber. So you were working,
and then you went to see I A And then
when you got out, from what I understand, you went
to Germany really to learn pastry. I didn't know you
were on the pastry path. Well, it wasn't necessarily a
hundred percent on the pastry path, as much as I
wanted a well rounded experience and see whatever you want
(14:53):
about German food. It was a big hotel, the hotel
buyer Chohof in Munich. It was a great kind of
European experience of that. Again to the hotel buyer Choholf, Yeah,
not the Germans. Yeah, there yes, that good. That's all
I got. Listen. I had a fun time in Germany.
But the real intention I got kind of pushed into
(15:15):
the pastry program and the pastry chef was an amazing
pastry chef named Chef Bile, and I had a blast.
I mean, I learned things and I did things that
have stuck with me throughout my career. So let's talk
about the difference between gelato and ice cream. I mean
for you, I mean we And by the way, this
is something we're pretty intimate with because we see a
lot on Chopped as we do. Remember we had an
Italian guy come in once and he whipped up a
(15:36):
gelato in no time flat, and I was like, what
can we go look at the tape because I didn't
even see what he did. I was like, whoa, it
was just delicious. But the eggs is really the main
thing about it, right, the egg the cream, And I
think the most important aspect is the temperature. You know,
you grew up in Rome, right, You're walking around Rome
and you get some of that great gelato and a
little cup with a spoon. The major differentiator is the
(15:59):
texture and also the temperature. Right, It's not overly frozen,
and I think that palatability is really the key. There's
something about I think those pastes that Italians have, right
the Statio paste, the hazelnut paste, and Torino obviously known
for chocolate. There's something about the jandula there, that hazelnut
chocolate combination. That just good stuff. When I'm in Rome
(16:21):
or like, I sit down, I'll have jarema, which is
basically cream ice cream, which are the two of them together.
It's like a perfect little And now let's talk about
different ways to eat the ice cream and the gelato
in Italy, because it was just in Siiciently. I've been
there twice in the past a couple of years, and
the one thing that I was super interested in was
they serve it in bread. They serve it in a
little panino. It's a brioche dough and they cut it
(16:43):
in half and they put the ice cream inside and
you eat it like a sandwich. I didn't understand what
this was all about, but then somebody explained to me,
because it's so hot in Sicily, it'll melt and if
it's in the bread, it will absorb it and you
can eat the whole thing. I have had that before,
not in Sicily. I started a little wine bar years
ago and we would do these little panini with the
gelato inside and take ground espresso and just sprinkle it
(17:05):
over the top. I never had that before, but it's
so Italian, just to sprinkle espresso beans ground over the
top of gelato and just eat it like that with
a little piece of brioche. It's so good. It's pretty exciting.
So when you're putting dessert menus together, and I did
notice you haven't deserted one of your places with it's
a warm chocolate egg with a burnt orange gelato. A
(17:26):
lot of people warm chocolate boom Negoti Vanille ice cream, right,
So for you pairing the gelatos with the desserts, what
is your thought process? I'm a big I'm a big
believer that when you're creating flavors, you want to create
layers of flavor. So within that burnt orange gelato, let's
say we would start with a vanilla base. And I
like the idea of charring or burning something, right, And
(17:46):
if you think about the rind of an orange and
you think about how that would burn, you think about
the oils and the essence and how that's going to
fill up your head as you're tasting it. Right, it's
not just a flavor as much as it's it's also
a breathe, right, So you breathe that flavor, just like
you don't taste vanilla, you breathe vanilla. Right. So I
feel like I always want to identify that breath of
(18:09):
food because it's something that sticks with you afterwards. So
I kind of like those things that it's not just
the flavor, but it stays with you and it's something
to contemplate a little afterwards. Well, they do say, I
mean the smell is also part of your taste that, right,
So you have to co operate all of the senses,
which is really interesting. So that's how it deserts trends.
What are you seeing people asking for now and how
are you dealing with that? So I think that balance
(18:31):
of saltiness is something that we see a lot, right,
people adding a lot of salty components on a dish.
I mean, that's something that's been happening for years, but
I'm starting to see more of it and also on
chopped you know. I feel like if you think about
the economics of a restaurant, one of the things that
I start to contemplate in restaurants is where can you
cut and what's going to be the effect of those cuts? Right,
nobody opens up a business because it's a welfare state.
(18:53):
You want to make money, right, We we all got
to make a living. You have two beautiful girls, I
gotta get through a college and I have wife with
very expensive taste, So you know that's that. But I
think ultimately the economics of creativity put us in a
situation where we can't fail. Right. We're in the old days.
There was a playfulness and a whimsical quality to a
(19:14):
lot of food, and I feel like that doesn't exist anymore.
We can't put ourselves in that situation. We need to
have winners or we need to cut, so the first
thing that's going to be cut or you know, a
lot of people just don't order desserts like they used
to write, At least in my restaurants they don't. So
what I've managed to do is try to either get
one pastry chef from multiple restaurants, or I feel like
(19:37):
I'm starting to see in a lot of restaurants is
chef driven desserts. So you really have to have everything
on the man's gotta be at home run because you
gotta sellent of that food that you're buying or else.
That's right, you want to make as many people happy
as possible. Right, That's why I think so many restaurants
are starting to put you know, month three that like
I here comes the burger, right, the burgers on the
menu now, because we can't fool around the demographic people
(20:00):
you have to please are a lot absolutely, I think
if you're thinking about dessert in general, and I'm not
sure if they were the first ones to do it,
but it was the Mermaid in Do you remember the
Mermaid in? Remember this? So this was like love this.
I read this story and I ran over there to
see it. So they didn't have a dessert menu. They
had a little espresso cup. They put a chocolate bodino
(20:21):
in there, right and you finished your meal, they dropped
this thing. It was literally three bites of chocolate pudding.
Get out. You need this table back because when you
think about the economics of the restaurant, dessert comes into
play a lot because the ingredients are cheap. It's eggs, flour, sugar,
not that expensive. But then you have van ella been
and you got chocolate things get a little bit more.
(20:42):
But when you think about the concept of dessert. If
I'm going to get eight bucks for one dessert on
a fore top and they're gonna stay another twenty minutes,
this nurse, this one, that's thing like get out, like
I'd rather not have dessert and get another table ordering
a bottle of wine. First of all, pastry chefs are expensive.
Pastry chefs also come with a different price tag sometimes
which is a very high maintenance on occasion, not always,
(21:02):
not always. But now let's not upset all the pastry
chefs out there that might be listening. But they must
have to reinvent themselves as well, because, as you said,
hire one pastry chef for four restaurants, come up with
three or four truck and do it, do the production
out of one kitchen, and then we'll allocate those expenses
to every single restaurant. Because it's the only way. I
did the math one time and one of the restaurants
that I had in Manhattan, and I looked at that
(21:24):
pastry department and I just said, we are losing money
every time somebody orders a dessert. We're losing money by
having it here. And then to your point, we need
to streamline it. So I think what's happening is you
get the great restaurants of the world that Danielle's and
Jean George is. They're still pushing the card that Blue Bernarden.
Eric has had the best pastry chefs I think in
this country for years. So is Danielle, right, and so
(21:47):
is Jean George. I mean, you keep you. But by
the way, his desserts are fantastic in his higher end restaurants,
I don't know if he really pushes the dessert I'm
sure that they help with the other restaurants that aren't.
As a good point, right, that's a good point, I mean,
because you need to and the me the ideas and
the metal lan and the petty fours and the chocolates
and all this stuff. At the end of the day,
it's a tremendous amount of work. And what's the return
(22:08):
because a lot of that stuff is free towards the
end of the meal, right, it's included that I wouldn't
say free, it's included in your experience and your experience.
I've always been of the million that, first of all,
if you're gonna have a restaurant and you're gonna make
your own bread, you better be a very busy restaurant
because there's bread makers out there that make bread every
day and bread is not that expensive. Rather buy really
good bread instead of relying on your staff. That's going
(22:30):
to maybe fluctuate. And they don't just make bread. People
who just make bread break bread and then do it
really well. And it's turning into also the gelato world
or the ice cream world. You've got companies like I mean,
he's doing amazing ice creams and getting these great flavors
and he's really just concentrating on one thing. Where in
my restaurants, if I wanted to have a restaurant where
I would have a pastries, you have making ice cream
(22:52):
or gelato. That's not all they're doing. And it's a
pretty expensive. It's almost economically it's cheaper for me to
order it from laboratory O, pay them the money and
then serve their and stuff. Yeah, I mean, Johnny Machine,
is you gonna sell a lot of ice cream? It's
a lot of ice cream for your r O. I
I mean, that's you know, think about it. It's pathetic
that we have to think these ways. My friend, back
(23:12):
in the day when we were working for other people,
we'd say, what are you talking about? Every restaurant eat
an ice cream machine? Absolutely, I'm just not our money.
All right, it's that time. I'd like to play a
little game at the end of the show. I'm going
to ask you a question. You give me the first
word that pops in your head. Chocolate, vanilla, vanilla, coup
or cone cup, brownie or blondie. Now that's we're talking food. Oh,
(23:36):
I'll take the brownie. Okay, yeah, cake or pie pudding. Oh,
there you go. You chrip me up on that favorite
flavor of gelato. I agree with you on the jan
If I'm in Italy, I will have Jean Douya. I
will not necessarily have Jean Douya in the US if
I'm here, So you know, I probably go for a
Sorbay So I know it's a sad empathetic Oh no, no,
(23:57):
that's not sounded prophetic. Um. Least favorite ice cream? Oh
you know, I rum raisin. I don't like the texture
of the raisins in my ice cream. And what topping
on an ice cream? What's your favorite toppings? Oh? You
know how much I love peanuts. So it goes on
and on, about peanuts. I love, I love what reminds
(24:18):
you of your childhood. Remember the straw You don't remember
this stuff. But the ice cream trucks would come around
the neighborhood and there was like a Strawberry shortcake ice
cream and I saw that. And there was another one
called the Toasted Almond Bar, which was like off the charts.
It was so awesome, awesome, awesome. That sounds delicious. Well
this is it, buddy. Thank you so much for coming
(24:39):
down here to the Sanctuary and talking about ice cream.
Thank you for inviting me to appreciate it. Well, that's
it for today, guys. I hope you had a good time.
I want to thank my guests Brian Smith and Jackie
Couscuna and my friend Scott Conan. See you next week.
Food three sixes a production of I Heart Radio and
(25:01):
I'm your host, Mark Murphy. A very special thanks to
Emily carpet In, my director of Communications, and producers Nikki
Etre and Christina Everett. Mixing and music by Anna Stump
and recording help from Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzel. Thank
you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weissenstein for handling research.
Fruit through Sixty is executive produced by manguest at Ticketer.
(25:24):
For more podcasts at my heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. Really, what determines whether you're making good
ice cream or not, like in most food, is what
the ingredients are that are going into the machine. Where
as much of a bakery as we are an ice
cream factory. You're walking around Rome and you get some
of that great celato and a little cup with a spoon.
(00:22):
It's not overly frozen, and I think that palatability is
really the key. Welcome to Food three sixty, the podcast
that serves up some serious of food for thought. I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know me
as a chef and a New York restaurateur. Today you're
in for a treat. We're going to talk all about
ice cream. That was Brian Smith, Jackie Couscuna, and Scott
(00:47):
Cohen you heard at the start of the show. All
of my guests today can speak with authority on the
magical world of professional ice cream making. I first spoke
to Brian Smith and Jackie Couscuna, owners of one of
New York's most popular ice crea spots, Ample Hills Creamery.
Making ice cream was always just a fun hobby for
the couple, but it wasn't until two thousand and ten,
(01:07):
when Brian faced some work struggles that he decided to
chase after his dream of opening up an ice cream shop.
Just four days after they opened their doors to the
first brick and mortar store, Brian and Jackie ran out
of all hundred and thirty gallons of ice cream and
were forced to close for nine days. Since then, Ample
Hills popularity has only grown. It's been rated the gats
(01:27):
number one ice cream in New York City, named the
best ice cream in America by the Food Network, and
has been an Oprah's coveted list of Favorite Things. Well,
Brian and Jackie, thank you very much for joining me
here today. Thanks. So let's hear how ample Hills began.
Jackie you were a school teacher and Brian, you were
producing audio books and writing monster movies. Yeah. Really, I
(01:51):
was the one obsessed with ice cream. My palette never
really started expanding after the age of seven, and so
ice cream was just this thing that I was in
love with from childhood and would make ice cream and
found myself making ice cream as a creative outlet from
my day job, which was a creative outlet because I
was a screenwriter. So that started to tell me that
(02:11):
maybe something was wrong with the screenwriting. And I'm honestly,
I make better ice cream than I wrote screenplays. Well,
there you go. You went with the positive that it
was the setup, like in the apartment, so you're teaching,
you come home the kitchens full of ice cream when
you get home. Yes, he would make ice cream flavors
and like kind of ridiculous ones where I would taste
them and say absolutely not, Like he did a you
(02:32):
who flavor? Do you remember that one? Yeah? That was
with Eminem's rolls. Oh that was horrible. It didn't make
the menu. I guess. We started actually with using a
hand cranked ice cream maker up in the Adirondacks in
a cabin in the woods, because every August my family
would go up to the ad Aroundecks and the same
(02:54):
cabin community for like, I think it's been over forty
years now and I've been going for twenty years, and
so a weight in to her parents, you know, to
bring my ice cream maker. And it really was as
ideentic as it sounds. We'd sit on the porch and
we'd crank ice cream. And as we started to get
the notion, Hey, maybe we should turn this into a business.
Then we would gather people around have them try the
(03:15):
ice cream, test it out. There was a lot of
that kind of trial and error. And what's the secret
to making good ice cream at home? What is the secret?
Brian not Rolls will tell you that one secret is
the machine that you're using. And so as messy as
it is, a hand cranked ice cream maker, and this
is a little technical, but it actually makes ice cream
faster than one of the newfangled ones that has a
(03:39):
compressor that you pluck into the wall. And the reason
for that is that that compressor can't drop the temperature
of your liquid ice cream mix and turn it into
a solid as quickly as the combination of ice and
rock salt. There's something chemical that happens with the rock
salt and the ice that lowers that freezing point really quickly.
And the faster you freeze ice cream, the smaller the
(03:59):
ice crystals are in the ice cream, and therefore the
smoother and creamier the ice cream. So even though it's
messier and it's been around for a hundred and fifty years,
the hand cranked ice cream maker is the way to go.
Plus it's just more fun. I used to make this
ice cream when I worked in the pastry department and
a one star missing restaurant in Paris, and we used
to turn our ice creams before service for lunch and
before service for dinner, so they were at the optimal temperature.
(04:21):
And we use this old machine. They used to have
any freeze on the outside those no and I had
this big stick I had just stick in there to
pull it out. It was a real pain in the body.
Same concept. I don't think they used the anti freeze
anymore at a commercial level. Now they make ice cream
the same way. It's just a much much more powerful compressor.
You started in two thousand eleven. Now you've got stores
(04:42):
in l A, Florida, New Jersey, New York. So do
you make everything at each shop or do you make
it in one place. Well, now that we have our factory,
we make everything there in Red Hook and then we
ship it to all our other shops. But we started
with just one on Vanderbilt Avenue and Prospect Heights, and
then when that took off, we realized that we had
a tiny little kitchen there. I think it was like
(05:03):
hundred seventy square feet and then we opened another shop
with a bigger kitchen, and then we realized that we
had to scale up even more and back to the bank. Yeah. Yeah,
Basically you were just talking about those new machines that
you have. But is there some way or what do
you do to make it still feel like it's a
local homemade ice cream? Yeah? I think ultimately there's a
(05:23):
bit of a myth around what that means to be
homemade or to be small batch. The machinery itself doesn't
determine the quality of the product. I mean, if anything,
the machinery that we're using now is better than the
machinery that we were using at the beginning because it
turns things faster and smoother and quicker. Really, what determines
whether you're making good ice cream or not, like in
(05:45):
most food, is what the ingredients are that are going
into the machine. You know. The reason that mass produced
gets a bad name is that most times when people
get up to mass produce, they cut all the costs,
they get poorer ingredients, and they shove it down into
the pipe. But as we've gotten we can gain some
efficiencies by buying paletts of sugar at a time. But
we're not buying worset sugar, We're not buying worse cream.
(06:07):
We're putting the same products into the machinery, so we're
getting the same problem. You're keeping it, keeping it real.
And we also we make everything from scrap the bakery,
that's right. I mean, we're as much of a bakery
as we are an ice cream factory. So we bake
all of our mixings are gooey, our baked on baked cookies,
everything in house, which is very different because there aren't
(06:29):
that many ice cream companies that a have as many
mixings I think as we do. We're not called ample
for nothing and then be just that does it themselves.
You can buy a lot of those pre made mixings
from companies that sell them to ice cream companies, kids
and things like exactly. Although we're not opposed to kit cats,
(06:49):
they have a place just not in you who ice cream.
So let's talk about marketing. I know you've done certain
like limited editions for certain events like the royal wedding
or the presidential elections, and then you also do things
with Marvel and with Disney. I've heard you do the
Star Wars ice cream. We really love to find ways
to tell actual narrative stories with ice cream, and you know,
(07:10):
and clearly it comes from some of my background of
trying to write screenplays and write movies, and so we've
looked for whether it's things that are licensed material like
Star Wars, we did, Mickey Mouse, We're working on Marvel
right now. We're telling our own stories, our own versions
of those things through ice cream flavors. What's the story
and that's how we turn it into an ice cream flavor.
(07:31):
So let's say the history of ice cream. I was
reading a little bit about it, and I guess you know,
ice cream was really for rich people because it was
expensive to freeze things. Do you know much about how
it became so central to American life? Ice cream is
an American concept. Really starts to happen for public consumption
around the turn of the century of the World's Fair
and St. Louis in nineteen o four, the advent of
(07:55):
the waffle cone or the ice cream cone, and ice
cream then became a more popular pedestrian enterprise as opposed
to the product of the wealthy. And a lot of
that had to do with the machinery that could then
make it, and refrigeration and that sort of thing. I mean,
the really interesting thing around Prohibition that really was the
advent of ice cream. Soda fountains, bars closed down exactly,
(08:19):
and so the American populace flooded to soda fountains and
getting phosp fates and ice cream and the soda parlor.
That kind of concept really got a boon from prohibition.
So they were instead of getting an alcohol high, they
were getting our Americans had to get high somewhere. And
how do you come up with new flavors? I think
the storytelling is probably the biggest part. Sometimes it's led
(08:42):
by ingredients. Sometimes we have contests online where we ask
people to create their own flavors and name them. The
key for us is to make flavors that are playful
and whimsical. We have a very artisanal product. We make
everything from scratch, but we're not a one ice cream shop.
We're not making goat cheese and miso ice cream or
(09:03):
saffron ice cream. We're making ice cream aimed at kids,
and more importantly kids inside of adults. And so when
we think about flavors, we think about things that are
going to trigger that moment of nostalgia, you know. We
think of it as little time machines. Honestly, that's really
what we're aiming for. I've obviously being a chef, and
I've made recipes some that I'm like, Okay, this one's
(09:23):
gonna kill it. This is my favorite dish and it
just completely flops. Have you had one of those? Yeah?
What's that said? Yes? Yes, of course we have to
talk about it. Yes, yes, this is Brian's brilliant idea.
Wasn't it you who won? Because we hadn't had a shop,
you're already getting the blame. This was once we opened
(09:43):
the shop. We had a flavor called the Beer mun
Cheese And so basically, you know how um, beer and
cheddar go together, right becauld you make a fun do
and you know how you then dip apples into that
beer cheddar fun do and that really goes together. But
nobody ever thought of beer and apple and cheddar ice cream.
So basically this was an apple lambic ice cream, So
(10:06):
an apple beer flavor of the ice cream. And then
we took cheese nips and cheetos and cheese pretzels and
broke them up and toss them in butter and sugar
and baked them and use that as the mix him, So,
how much of that did you throw out? We didn't
actually throw it at the time. We were only making
two at a time. There was one guy who probably
bought about half of it. He was upset. We never
(10:27):
brought it back, but we have one shop. You can
have a failure like the beer Munchies. Now, if we
had a failure like the beer Muntrees, it would cost
us a little more because we'd have to make a
lot more tubs. And another question, because this also happens
a flavor you've came up with it or people you're
working with and you're both like, I don't think this
is gonna work, and it totally blew you away. Like
people love it, Like do you have one of those?
(10:49):
It's called corn to Run? Corn? Yes, corn to Run.
It's a corn ice cream with swirls of blueberry and
like a corn meal crumble, and it is so insanely good.
I guess that might be my favorite flavor. Action. We
thought that was going to be like a little esoteric,
a little bit off Brandon, maybe not so popular, but
(11:10):
we have to bring it back this summer. Because we
are bringing it back and really been upset about it.
That's pretty cool. I haven't tried that one, insane. So
what's next for you guys. There's there a new flavor
that we should be sitting on the edge of our
chair waiting for. We've just launched this collaboration with Marvel,
which is super exciting because we're doing Captain America ice cream,
Black Panther ice cream, and Spiderman ice cream, and all
(11:32):
three of them we actually did original artwork and told
these origin stories that wrap around the pine containers. It's
super cool. So you have a really good relationship with
Marvel obviously, Yeah. I mean the crazy thing is it's
kind of a fun story. I mean Marvel of course
owned by Disney as his Star Wars, as was Mickey
Mouse that we also did. And all that comes from
a relationship with Bob Iger, the CEO, because he ordered
(11:54):
ice cream one day, just happened to order it online.
We shipped it to him, and maybe what two or
three days later, he emailed me and just said, hey,
I love your ice cream. If there's anything at all
I can do to help, let me know, Bob. And
so it was just one of those things that just
dropped out of the universe. And I grew up in
South Florida. I mean, we went to Disney all the
time as a kid, and so I think there was
(12:16):
a lot of that baked into the way we thought
about storytelling and ice cream and experience the way that
Disney does. And so you know, he's become a mentor
and a friend. He's visited the shops and all of
those products that we've done have been a direct relationship
from that. That's awesome. I love that you guys are
cooking something and telling stories, you know, getting together with
Marvel and Disney. It's very unique. I think that's very cool. Well,
(12:38):
Brian and Jackie, thank you so much for being here
and talking about ice cream. Thank you. Yea more on
Food three sixty right after this quick break. Welcome back
to Food three sixty. Now that we've learned something about
ice cream, I thought it would be interesting to hear
more about ice cream's Italian cousin jail out or so
(13:01):
I asked my friends Scott Khan to join me. Scott
began his food journey when he enrolled in cooking classes
at a local community college at age eleven. He went
on to attend the Culinary Institute of America, and after graduating,
he spent a year in Munich, Germany, studying pastry. After
returning to New York, Scott gained a following for his
modern take on Italian cuisine at a number of restaurants,
(13:23):
but he really put his name on the map when
he opened Limbo in two thousand two. Currently owns a
number of restaurants around the country as a fellow judge
un Chopped, and hosts Best Baker in America on Food Network. Scott,
I want to welcome you to Arizona, but I can't
really welcome you to Arizona because you actually live here now.
I do live here now. Yes, we're both here for
the Nirvana Food and Wine Festival. I'm usually in his
(13:46):
studio in New York City. This is the first time
I'm doing it off site, so I'm very excited about this.
So when you started out, you're a little kid and
you're like dreaming about what you're gonna do for the
rest of your life, and you thought cooking. Was that
your first thought? So I went to a vocational school
in water, Connecticut. I'm from a small town called Oakville
in Connecticut. If you're not sure the way vocational schools work,
basically you choose a trade. You can choose carpentry or plumbing,
(14:09):
or electrical fashion design. My first choice was plumbing, My
second choice was culinary arts, and my third choice was
hair dressing. Yeah, I mean, look at this head. And
you went into cooking because you like the outfit better
than the plumbing. Well, I couldn't get into the plumbing
program because too many people had applied, so it was
a second choice. So you were turned down from the plumbing.
(14:31):
And it told you it was because my grades weren't
good enough. But good enough to be a cook you
have to be to be a plumber. So you were working,
and then you went to see I A And then
when you got out, from what I understand, you went
to Germany really to learn pastry. I didn't know you
were on the pastry path. Well, it wasn't necessarily a
hundred percent on the pastry path, as much as I
wanted a well rounded experience and see whatever you want
(14:53):
about German food. It was a big hotel, the hotel
buyer Chohof in Munich. It was a great kind of
European experience of that. Again to the hotel buyer Choholf, Yeah,
not the Germans. Yeah, there yes, that good. That's all
I got. Listen. I had a fun time in Germany.
But the real intention I got kind of pushed into
(15:15):
the pastry program and the pastry chef was an amazing
pastry chef named Chef Bile, and I had a blast.
I mean, I learned things and I did things that
have stuck with me throughout my career. So let's talk
about the difference between gelato and ice cream. I mean
for you, I mean we And by the way, this
is something we're pretty intimate with because we see a
lot on Chopped as we do. Remember we had an
Italian guy come in once and he whipped up a
(15:36):
gelato in no time flat, and I was like, what
can we go look at the tape because I didn't
even see what he did. I was like, whoa, it
was just delicious. But the eggs is really the main
thing about it, right, the egg the cream, And I
think the most important aspect is the temperature. You know,
you grew up in Rome, right, You're walking around Rome
and you get some of that great gelato and a
little cup with a spoon. The major differentiator is the
(15:59):
texture and also the temperature. Right, It's not overly frozen,
and I think that palatability is really the key. There's
something about I think those pastes that Italians have, right
the Statio paste, the hazelnut paste, and Torino obviously known
for chocolate. There's something about the jandula there, that hazelnut
chocolate combination. That just good stuff. When I'm in Rome
(16:21):
or like, I sit down, I'll have jarema, which is
basically cream ice cream, which are the two of them together.
It's like a perfect little And now let's talk about
different ways to eat the ice cream and the gelato
in Italy, because it was just in Siiciently. I've been
there twice in the past a couple of years, and
the one thing that I was super interested in was
they serve it in bread. They serve it in a
little panino. It's a brioche dough and they cut it
(16:43):
in half and they put the ice cream inside and
you eat it like a sandwich. I didn't understand what
this was all about, but then somebody explained to me,
because it's so hot in Sicily, it'll melt and if
it's in the bread, it will absorb it and you
can eat the whole thing. I have had that before,
not in Sicily. I started a little wine bar years
ago and we would do these little panini with the
gelato inside and take ground espresso and just sprinkle it
(17:05):
over the top. I never had that before, but it's
so Italian, just to sprinkle espresso beans ground over the
top of gelato and just eat it like that with
a little piece of brioche. It's so good. It's pretty exciting.
So when you're putting dessert menus together, and I did
notice you haven't deserted one of your places with it's
a warm chocolate egg with a burnt orange gelato. A
(17:26):
lot of people warm chocolate boom Negoti Vanille ice cream, right,
So for you pairing the gelatos with the desserts, what
is your thought process? I'm a big I'm a big
believer that when you're creating flavors, you want to create
layers of flavor. So within that burnt orange gelato, let's
say we would start with a vanilla base. And I
like the idea of charring or burning something, right, And
(17:46):
if you think about the rind of an orange and
you think about how that would burn, you think about
the oils and the essence and how that's going to
fill up your head as you're tasting it. Right, it's
not just a flavor as much as it's it's also
a breathe, right, So you breathe that flavor, just like
you don't taste vanilla, you breathe vanilla. Right. So I
feel like I always want to identify that breath of
(18:09):
food because it's something that sticks with you afterwards. So
I kind of like those things that it's not just
the flavor, but it stays with you and it's something
to contemplate a little afterwards. Well, they do say, I
mean the smell is also part of your taste that, right,
So you have to co operate all of the senses,
which is really interesting. So that's how it deserts trends.
What are you seeing people asking for now and how
are you dealing with that? So I think that balance
(18:31):
of saltiness is something that we see a lot, right,
people adding a lot of salty components on a dish.
I mean, that's something that's been happening for years, but
I'm starting to see more of it and also on
chopped you know. I feel like if you think about
the economics of a restaurant, one of the things that
I start to contemplate in restaurants is where can you
cut and what's going to be the effect of those cuts? Right,
nobody opens up a business because it's a welfare state.
(18:53):
You want to make money, right, We we all got
to make a living. You have two beautiful girls, I
gotta get through a college and I have wife with
very expensive taste, So you know that's that. But I
think ultimately the economics of creativity put us in a
situation where we can't fail. Right. We're in the old days.
There was a playfulness and a whimsical quality to a
(19:14):
lot of food, and I feel like that doesn't exist anymore.
We can't put ourselves in that situation. We need to
have winners or we need to cut, so the first
thing that's going to be cut or you know, a
lot of people just don't order desserts like they used
to write, At least in my restaurants they don't. So
what I've managed to do is try to either get
one pastry chef from multiple restaurants, or I feel like
(19:37):
I'm starting to see in a lot of restaurants is
chef driven desserts. So you really have to have everything
on the man's gotta be at home run because you
gotta sellent of that food that you're buying or else.
That's right, you want to make as many people happy
as possible. Right, That's why I think so many restaurants
are starting to put you know, month three that like
I here comes the burger, right, the burgers on the
menu now, because we can't fool around the demographic people
(20:00):
you have to please are a lot absolutely, I think
if you're thinking about dessert in general, and I'm not
sure if they were the first ones to do it,
but it was the Mermaid in Do you remember the
Mermaid in? Remember this? So this was like love this.
I read this story and I ran over there to
see it. So they didn't have a dessert menu. They
had a little espresso cup. They put a chocolate bodino
(20:21):
in there, right and you finished your meal, they dropped
this thing. It was literally three bites of chocolate pudding.
Get out. You need this table back because when you
think about the economics of the restaurant, dessert comes into
play a lot because the ingredients are cheap. It's eggs, flour, sugar,
not that expensive. But then you have van ella been
and you got chocolate things get a little bit more.
(20:42):
But when you think about the concept of dessert. If
I'm going to get eight bucks for one dessert on
a fore top and they're gonna stay another twenty minutes,
this nurse, this one, that's thing like get out, like
I'd rather not have dessert and get another table ordering
a bottle of wine. First of all, pastry chefs are expensive.
Pastry chefs also come with a different price tag sometimes
which is a very high maintenance on occasion, not always,
(21:02):
not always. But now let's not upset all the pastry
chefs out there that might be listening. But they must
have to reinvent themselves as well, because, as you said,
hire one pastry chef for four restaurants, come up with
three or four truck and do it, do the production
out of one kitchen, and then we'll allocate those expenses
to every single restaurant. Because it's the only way. I
did the math one time and one of the restaurants
that I had in Manhattan, and I looked at that
(21:24):
pastry department and I just said, we are losing money
every time somebody orders a dessert. We're losing money by
having it here. And then to your point, we need
to streamline it. So I think what's happening is you
get the great restaurants of the world that Danielle's and
Jean George is. They're still pushing the card that Blue Bernarden.
Eric has had the best pastry chefs I think in
this country for years. So is Danielle, right, and so
(21:47):
is Jean George. I mean, you keep you. But by
the way, his desserts are fantastic in his higher end restaurants,
I don't know if he really pushes the dessert I'm
sure that they help with the other restaurants that aren't.
As a good point, right, that's a good point, I mean,
because you need to and the me the ideas and
the metal lan and the petty fours and the chocolates
and all this stuff. At the end of the day,
it's a tremendous amount of work. And what's the return
(22:08):
because a lot of that stuff is free towards the
end of the meal, right, it's included that I wouldn't
say free, it's included in your experience and your experience.
I've always been of the million that, first of all,
if you're gonna have a restaurant and you're gonna make
your own bread, you better be a very busy restaurant
because there's bread makers out there that make bread every
day and bread is not that expensive. Rather buy really
good bread instead of relying on your staff. That's going
(22:30):
to maybe fluctuate. And they don't just make bread. People
who just make bread break bread and then do it
really well. And it's turning into also the gelato world
or the ice cream world. You've got companies like I mean,
he's doing amazing ice creams and getting these great flavors
and he's really just concentrating on one thing. Where in
my restaurants, if I wanted to have a restaurant where
I would have a pastries, you have making ice cream
(22:52):
or gelato. That's not all they're doing. And it's a
pretty expensive. It's almost economically it's cheaper for me to
order it from laboratory O, pay them the money and
then serve their and stuff. Yeah, I mean, Johnny Machine,
is you gonna sell a lot of ice cream? It's
a lot of ice cream for your r O. I
I mean, that's you know, think about it. It's pathetic
that we have to think these ways. My friend, back
(23:12):
in the day when we were working for other people,
we'd say, what are you talking about? Every restaurant eat
an ice cream machine? Absolutely, I'm just not our money.
All right, it's that time. I'd like to play a
little game at the end of the show. I'm going
to ask you a question. You give me the first
word that pops in your head. Chocolate, vanilla, vanilla, coup
or cone cup, brownie or blondie. Now that's we're talking food. Oh,
(23:36):
I'll take the brownie. Okay, yeah, cake or pie pudding. Oh,
there you go. You chrip me up on that favorite
flavor of gelato. I agree with you on the jan
If I'm in Italy, I will have Jean Douya. I
will not necessarily have Jean Douya in the US if
I'm here, So you know, I probably go for a
Sorbay So I know it's a sad empathetic Oh no, no,
(23:57):
that's not sounded prophetic. Um. Least favorite ice cream? Oh
you know, I rum raisin. I don't like the texture
of the raisins in my ice cream. And what topping
on an ice cream? What's your favorite toppings? Oh? You
know how much I love peanuts. So it goes on
and on, about peanuts. I love, I love what reminds
(24:18):
you of your childhood. Remember the straw You don't remember
this stuff. But the ice cream trucks would come around
the neighborhood and there was like a Strawberry shortcake ice
cream and I saw that. And there was another one
called the Toasted Almond Bar, which was like off the charts.
It was so awesome, awesome, awesome. That sounds delicious. Well
this is it, buddy. Thank you so much for coming
(24:39):
down here to the Sanctuary and talking about ice cream.
Thank you for inviting me to appreciate it. Well, that's
it for today, guys. I hope you had a good time.
I want to thank my guests Brian Smith and Jackie
Couscuna and my friend Scott Conan. See you next week.
Food three sixes a production of I Heart Radio and
(25:01):
I'm your host, Mark Murphy. A very special thanks to
Emily carpet In, my director of Communications, and producers Nikki
Etre and Christina Everett. Mixing and music by Anna Stump
and recording help from Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzel. Thank
you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weissenstein for handling research.
Fruit through Sixty is executive produced by manguest at Ticketer.
(25:24):
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