How do ice cream parlors make their "homemade ice cream"?
The sign "homemade ice cream" conjures up images of white-hatted cooks cracking eggs, measuring out milk and sugar, chopping up fresh fruit and, perhaps, pinching off pieces of homemade chocolate chip cookie dough or crumbling up homemade brownies.
The truth is that most ice cream parlors ("scoop shops" in industry parlance) "make" their ice cream using a prepackaged "ice-cream mix" that contains milk, cream, sugar, flavorings, emulsifiers and, sometimes, egg. The mix is poured into a batch freezer that churns the liquid while it solidifies into ice cream.
Commercial ice-cream mixes vary as widely in composition and quality as do any other packaged products, but all of them must adhere to federal regulations concerning what is considered ice cream.
The Food and Drug Administration defines ice cream as "a food produced by freezing, while stirring, a pasteurized mix" that contains one or more of so-called "optional dairy ingredients," a long list that includes - but is by no means limited to - cream, dried cream, "plastic" cream (aka concentrated milk fat), butter, butter oil, milk, concentrated milk, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, superheated condensed milk, dried milk, skim milk, nonfat dry milk, whey and modified whey products.
For an illuminating look at the scoop-shop industry, you can pay a visit to icecreamproducts.com, the Web site of A. Panza and Sons, a large New Jersey-based scoop-shop supplier. Panza offers six different vanilla mixes that range in price from $29 (for four gallons) to $42. The fat content ranges from 10 percent to 16 percent, and roughly correlates to price.
Some scoop shops use a vanilla mix for everything, others also use a chocolate mix. Almost all other flavors are made from one of these two mixes, perhaps with the addition of a commercial flavor base such as R&H butterscotch base ($77.62 for six 3-quart cans) and/or a liquid flavoring such as Oringer coconut flavor ($13.32 for 1 quart).
A common component of much modern ice cream is the "mix-in." It's certainly possible that some scoop shops have elves in back hacking fine chocolate into chips and breaking up Heath bars, but they can also avail themselves of Panza's three brands of frozen brownie pieces, chopped Reese's Pieces, chopped frozen Twix bars, four types of "cake crunch," crushed generic chocolate sandwich cremes and crushed genuine Oreo cookies. An 18-pound box of frozen Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate-chip-cookie dough pellets is $35.75.
For fruit flavors, shops have access to frozen fruit, and canned purees and concentrates. Panza sells Chiquita banana puree, Oringer apple base and R&H strawberry puree, among dozens of others.
Of course there are ice-cream parlors that use the highest-quality mixes they can find, and combine them with fresh, homemade ingredients. Sip N' Soda in Southampton, for example, buys 30 flats of local strawberries every summer, then freezes them so the store can make strawberry ice cream year-round.
Still, if an ice-cream parlor bought a cheap mix and then added cheap, mass-produced flavorings and mix-ins to it, the resulting product could still be called "homemade."
I do not mean to imply that "homemade" ice cream is an inferior product, only to point out that it is not by definition a superior one.
There are many good brands of mass-produced ice cream: Hershey's (no relation to the chocolate company), Edy's, Häagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry's or, on a smaller scale, Ciao Bella or Ronnybrook Farm. Given a choice between a cone of Edy's chocolate and a cone of "homemade" chocolate ice cream made by someone I've never met, I'd probably go for the Edy's.
E-mail your queries or write to
Erica Marcus, Food/Part 2,
Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd.,
Melville, NY 11747-4250.
North Shore
