Brian Smith
I went to the ice cream school that Ben and Jerry famously attended when they started. Penn State has a week-long ice cream chemistry class in the middle of January, which I attended. That was really helpful.
First, everybody there says, "Don't make your own ice cream from scratch. Buy ice cream because it's chemically complicated." You know, getting the fats and the solids right and all of that stuff.
But again, I got the tools and the basic background there. That’s really how we got off and running.
The number one thing I think made our ice cream different at the time—and I do think other people are doing these things now—was increasing what are called the solids in the ice cream.
Basically, you know, the number one ingredient in whole milk is water, and the number one ingredient in heavy cream is water. I mean, 60% of heavy cream is water and 96% of whole milk is water and water. You need the properties of water that turn into ice, the freezing properties of it, to turn your ice cream from a liquid into a solid, but nobody wants icy ice cream.
And, and of course you could make ice cream with just milk and cream, um, and sugar. But, uh, when you do that, you end up with something that's, that's ier or thinner. There's not as much there. And so skim milk powder, a non-fat dry milk powder is a tool that ice cream makers use. And that's basically all the milk solids without, ah, the milk water, you know, it basically thickens or absorbs the water that's there.
Yep. And gives you a milkier, more solid taste. And then, one of the things was just increasing the amount of solids. And then at the time with Ample Hills, we were using, um, eggs and egg yolks in the ice cream. Not enough that it became real. Custard flavor. But just enough to serve as another emulsifier, a thickener to the ice cream.
Later on when we lost Ample Hills and we started our second ice cream brand, The Social, we actually jettisoned the eggs because I was interested in seeing if I could make what's considered like a Philadelphia style ice cream. It's a cleaner, uh, flavor because ultimately the eggs do provide a flavor.
Yeah. Which is a nice flavor, but it's also a barrier to whatever the flavor of the ice cream is. And so people that are real Philadelphia style ice cream fanatics, like the cleanness of that product. And so I was really interested though. Can you make a Philadelphia style ice cream that still has the thickness and the richness and the chew? The sort of texture that we had at Ample Hills comes from all that body, from the solids of the eggs and skim milk powder.
And I found that using, um, glucose, which is a, you know, an invert sugar, a liquid form of sucrose or, or table sugar if you're using some glucose into it. It has this same kind of real thickening, um, chew gives the ice cream a real chew. And so I really don't think we miss the eggs. And you know, in that way you're also removing another allergen that some people have.And so anyway, those are some of the ways I think that we thought about how to make the ice cream better or different.
Josh Sharkey
But even like the things you folded into like the honeycomb. One you gotta have a lot of honeycomb, which it did. But then, you know, the actual ingredients independent of the ice cream were also really good.Yeah. How did you, did you also try to spend time somewhere learning that? Or was that just trial and error?
Brian Smith
I was just trial and error, making lots of brownies and cookies and cakes and all of those kinds of things at home. And the nice thing there and that I still love about making ice cream is you don't have to worry about what, uh, any of those things look like.
You know, bakers and people going to all those schools really have to worry about presentation. That's a good point. I really don't have to worry about it with ice cream, as long as I can chop it up into little pieces and put it into the ice cream. It only matters what it tastes like. And so it's kind of a freedom to really think about, you know, what's the densest, chewiest cake that I could put into an ice cream, or brittles or toffees, or cookies.
All of those kinds of things. Some of those recipes came from—one of them came from your mom or your grandma? The Nona D's, the Oatmeal.That was a good one. That was an oatmeal cookie that your mom made.
Josh Sharkey
Yeah, that was a really good one. What's the key to Honeycomb? To make it really good? They're big pieces, but the texture is what's important, right? It's still something you can bite into. It doesn't break your teeth, but enough.
Brian Smith
It's funny because Honeycomb. If you just eat it, the same honeycomb that we would make if you would just eat it outside of the ice cream, it did have the effect of breaking your teeth or sticking to your teeth. Yes, it was not that pleasant. There's something about eating it within the milk and cream and the fats there that coat the experience.
Sounds a little funny, but like when you're eating it in ice cream. Is definitely a little better. But, uh, you know, honeycomb is really just, you know, sugar. We would make ours with some golden syrup, which again a form is sucrose but it is less refined, so it has some of those molasses or caramel notes to it.
And uh, is it baking soda now? Like it's been so long. Yeah. Baking soda. That air rates it when you, when you get to a certain temperature and then you spread it out and try to like, keep it from collapsing.Fun fact. What was that?
Jackie Cuscuna
Oh my god. A hundred acre wood. A hundred acre wood. A hundred acre Woods was an homage to Winnie. Winnie the Pooh a hundred acre wood. Mm-hmm. I think it was a sweet cream based with honeycomb candy and then we added gummy bears.
I didn't have that too, it was like all natural gummy bears. Wow. But we quickly realized how, yeah, we made it once. I mean like, no, we made it more than once. It actually made it into our cookbook, I think. Didn't it? Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't remember.
Brian Smith
Now the problem with gummy bears when they're in ice cream is that they break your teeth.
Jackie Cuscuna
Yeah. Those were, those were vicious.
Brian Smith
Yeah. So we quickly took them out and then that's how we had ice cream. The flavor is called Sweet as Honey, which was, I think, the one you're referring to with the honeycomb. But it started life as a hundred acre wood, hundred acre wood, which was
Josh Sharkey
Oh, interesting. It's so funny too, like the counter intuitiveness of flavors from, because I remember at Bark. By the way, we tried to use your ice cream a lot, but we couldn't figure out how to get enough wholesale. We have an incredible laboratory. Oh. Which is not really ice cream, it's enchilada, but John's stuff is incredible and we realized that we had to like over season to make the milkshakes.
We needed this sort of custom, like super dark, dark, dark, dark chocolate with extra salt, because once you add the milk. You're diluting it, uh, you're diluting it, and to get it, like, or for the coffee ice cream, you know, we would, uh, using the Gorilla Coffee, but we'd have to like, use like a double strength cold brew mixed into the, into the coffee because the ice cream just mellows everything out, you know?
Brian Smith
Yeah. I'll tell you, because we, it took us years to realize that, and we didn't actually do it at Ample Hills, but when we started the social, I knew that I wanted to get those milkshakes and, and raise them up a notch, and so we started making all of our own syrup. So we made chocolate syrup from scratch and vanilla syrup, and we made different flavored syrups that we would then add to the milkshakes. Yeah, so do the same thing you're talking about. Yep. Which would, uh, well, you know, if we made a chocolate milkshake, we'd put the chocolate syrup in, or the vanilla Yeah. Or an orange, uh, freeze.
Josh Sharkey
We'd add orange syrup to it, you know, because otherwise you're just simply diluting it. Yeah. It's just how dumb we were for our vanilla milkshake. For the irst year or two at Bark, we scraped a vanilla bean into every vanilla shake and had vanilla ice cream.
It was like this custom vanilla bean. Yeah. I mean, John, it was John's, uh, you know, vanilla gelato, which was incredible. That was profitable. And we would scrape a vanilla bean into each shake. Yeah. Okay. The team, wow. They were like, what are we doing here? This is crazy. And you would have to like to order, scraping this.That's the dumb stuff. Yeah.
Brian Smith
Well, when we started Ample Hills, we started by scraping hundreds of vanilla beans. We had a vat pasteurizer. Mm-hmm. The very first, when we started Ample Hills, we had a 15 gallon vat pasteurizer. Within two weeks I had ordered a 50 gallon VAT pasteurizer, and by the end of the summer we had a hundred gallon pasteurizer because we just couldn't, it didn't, you know, we couldn't make enough ice cream, but we were. Scraping. We'd get a hundred vanilla beans and we'd scrape them, you know, into the thing. And then we would throw in like a handful of coffee beans, you know, into the vanilla ice cream as well. And then you strain all of that out. And it really was incredible. But I, you know, it's beyond one shop, you can't do that. It's just
Josh Sharkey
I dunno if you use a vanilla paste, but that stuff is incredible. Yeah. I remember vanilla like the, what's the company? Tahitian Gold. They make this like vanilla paste. I remember when we found it, that's when we stopped using the vanilla beans. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Yeah, I mean it was really expensive. Yeah. Really just like ground up vanilla beans. But really good.
This show is brought to you by, you guessed it, meez.
meez helps thousands of restaurants and food service businesses all over the world. Build profitable menus and scale their business successfully.
If you're looking to organize your recipe IP and train your team to put out a consistent product every day in less time than ever before, then meez is just for you. And you can transform all those old Google Docs and Word Docs and PDFs and spreadsheets and Google Sheets. Into dynamic, actionable recipes and me and lightning speed Plus, stop all that manual work of processing invoices because meez will digitize all your purchases automatically.
And there's a built-in database of ingredient yields, prep yields and unit metric conversions for every ingredient, which means you're gonna get laser accurate food costs and a fraction of the time. Visit www.getmeez.com. That’s GETMEEZ dot com to learn and check out the show. We're gonna be adding promotions and discount codes so that all of you, lovely and brilliant me podcast listeners, get a sweet deal on meez.
Josh Sharkey
Well, you turned this sort of idea into Ample Hills, which is pretty insane that you were not an ice cream person and then all of a sudden opened up like this incredible ice cream shop. But like what were, what were your roles when you guys opened? Were you both full-time in the shop?
Jackie Cuscuna
No, I mean actually I was still teaching. I kept my teaching position. At night, I would be managing staff and scheduling and doing all front of house operations. Brian was kind of tied to the kitchen.
Brian Smith
You came home, you know, occasionally tired. Yeah. But, you know, Jackie was responsible for all the hiring and so a lot of the students that she had, because she was teaching at a high school, and so her students would come and work for us.
So it naturally sort of the role definition became, you know, I was back of house. She was at the front of the house and, and at the front of the house. It also was all the culture that sort of happened organically at first, that we then later codified into, you know, manuals and, and all the kind of things that you do. But that really came out of your background as a teacher and working with kids.
Jackie Cuscuna
Yeah, and then doing the birthday parties. That was a huge part of our business at Ample Hills in the beginning too. We had these little kids and we'd go to these terrible birthday parties in like a cement bunker and like, you know, they'd just like churn the party out and you're like, oh my God, I can't believe the, you know, um, I had to spend two hours of my life in this thing.
And so we were like, I was like, I can't, we have to make our parties like really fun and really experiential and um, and that's, I think it was like our last. Last like $5,000 that we had that everybody said, oh no, you wanna, you know, keep a, a buffer in the bank. You know? I were like, no, not that 5,000 would've been, it wasn't that much.
Brian Smith
But we spent that on the, uh, ice cream. The ice cream churning bicycle. Oh, I remember that thing. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. I didn't have kids at the time, but yeah. I wish I could bring my kids too.
We did so many birthday parties with that, with kids getting to ride the bicycle. Yeah. Our own kids had, you know, every birthday they had for the first. You know, three or four or five years the shop.
Josh Sharkey
What is the food cost on ice cream? The food cost? Like on a percentage wise?
Brian Smith
Oh, I mean, do like a, it, it, it should be like, you know, 25-30%. You know, oftentimes we were pushing 35%, um, just because we were, you know, buying, you know, the best ingredients and the best cream and the best eggs, you know, and it 'cause.
I mean, like anything, you know, you could, you can make ice cream with, you know, this heavy cream, which costs, you know, $80 for a five gallon bag, or you can pay $120 for a five gallon bag. But, you know, and maybe 75% of your audience isn't gonna tell the difference. But, you know, the 25 that can are gonna be the ones that are the brand ambassador.
So I, you know, it, it, I think the answer is it depends on, you know, who's making the ice cream and where it's coming from. But our goal was always to try to get it around 30%.
Josh Sharkey
Yeah. And was there one flavor that was the most profitable?
Brian Smith
I mean, the, the, the sweetest honey was, you know, was really good because it didn't take much honey to make honeycomb and it didn't have vanilla in it, which is expensive. Because the base was sweet cream. And that flavor was very popular.
Josh Sharkey
So I guess that would probably be the, it sounds like you were responsible for this, but like. Was there a lot of variability in the final product? Like how did you like QA and maintain consistency?
Brian Smith
I mean, the product I'm sure changed so much. I mean, mostly because I was constantly, uh, you know, tweaking it and changing it as we went. I remember listening to one of the episodes you did with Wylie Dufresne about how he kept iterating and iterating, and I definitely suffered from that for the first while. But I mean, I was the only one.
I was the only one making the ice cream for a long time. And so that was really the quality control because I was just making it, you know, and I knew I would make it the same way and put the same amount of pieces of cookie dough or ooey gooey cake in, and then over time I had other people and I would train them.
It's a challenging thing because it's very hard to say, uh, you know, this flavor gets exactly three cups of cookie dough mixed into it. I mean, because you're mixing it in as you're going and so you're trying to get the layers to all be right. It’s not a machine that's doing it. It's a person.
Yeah. And so it's not just following, you can follow the recipe to make sure that, you know, it always has the same amount of milk and cream and sugar in it. But the actual churning of it, you might pull it a little sooner, a little later, it gets a little thicker. So those were all just learnings that had to happen over time to try to really get consistency.
Josh Sharkey
Did you always plan to scale to more locations?
Brian Smith
No. I mean, I guess at first it was really just. Let's have a neighborhood shop, you know, and if it can, uh, pay a salary for me and Jackie can keep teaching and, and then like, oh, wow. Maybe it could make enough money that Jackie could not be teaching.
.png){kind=icon}
.png){kind=icon}
