How we come up with flavors
Posted on February 17th, 2009, by admin in UncategorizedToday, at a friend’s house I had delicious tomato marmalade. It was sweet, had saffron and a lot of orange. I think I may try to do something with this sooner or later. If we succeed in making this into a sorbet we can sell it to adventurous eaters and sophisticated restaurants. Vegetable sorbets are available in France and Italy. Our Spring Sorbet is made with cucumbers, although it is much more popular since we changed the name to Spring Sorbet.
Years ago I worried about running out of ideas for new flavors. Now I don’t, but I am amazed that new flavors continue to appear, or at least flavors that are new to me.
This weekend a customer suggested Hydrox Cookie with pieces of Cookie Dough. It sounds like a DQ Blizzard but maybe it will work.
A flavor can work for a few customers or a restaurant or a situation, or the flavor can become popular or broadly popular. Sometimes the flavor just works for me.
We made Mango Habanero for East Coast Grill. They occasionally have Hotter than Hell nights, when everything is scary hot. To make the Mango Habanero we wore safety goggles and gloves. The steam from cookies the peppers would aggravate your eyes and any of the hot stuff that got on your hands was a menace to life and limb.
Occasionally we make a flavor for a restaurant that I think is perfect. But only perfect for a restaurant. Quentin is the pastry chef of Restaurant La Voile on Newbury Street. Critics and informed eaters think it is the best French restaurant in Boston. Quentin asked for an oatmeal ice cream. At first I didn’t understand what he wanted. Eventually we made an oatmeal infusion with Scottish oatmeal, and then we sieved out all the oatmeal. Before sieving we had a very good breakfast cereal and after sieving we had a wonderful suggestion of oatmeal and oats. The ice cream was served with a tart. Most of our most unusual flavors are made for restaurants and these flavors are served as elements of complicated desserts.
Very people want an Oatmeal ice cream cone, or a Ginger Rose Petal sundae. But the sophisticated flavors work in appropriate settings.
A Harvard professor helped us to begin making Indian ice cream flavors. Over the years as Indian foods have become more popular, ice cream flavors like Saffron, Cardamom and Khulfee have developed “crossover appeal”. They are popular with all kinds of people. Mango ice cream and sorbet appeals to so many small groups that the group ends up being one of our biggest sellers and most popular subsets. South Americans, South Asians and East Asians all enjoy mangos. This winter we made a new variation: Mango Coconut Sorbet. The flavor was a little complex with several kinds of coconut and lime juice.
Black Bottom Pie is from America’s Deep South. Usually it has a ginger snap crust, and a chocolate rum filling. Sometimes it contains fruit. We make a chocolate rum ice cream and add ginger snap cookies. Ginger Snaps are very New England but the entire effect is unexpected and appealing.
Coffee Ice Cream Sandwich came about after a discussion of reduplication in Italian food. Italians will serve starches with starches, so you might have pasta with potatoes or a pizza that is topped with potatoes. I wanted to make ice cream that contained ice cream. Anyone who has gone to an American grade school is familiar with the taste and texture of ice cream sandwiches. We switched from using vanilla ice cream as the background flavor to Strawberry and Coffee ice creams because we wanted people to be able to see the distinctive chocolate wafers and the very simple vanilla ice cream contained between those wafers.
During our first year of business we made Carob ice cream for a single, wonderful and persistent customer. Carob was never a popular flavor, but even Haagen Dazs made a version of it. It was favored by health food eaters. When this cusomer finished her studies at MIT we stopped making the flavor. It had few other fans and none of the ice cream makers enjoyed making it or eating it.
Just for the record, our good friend Sunil Green (age 9) suggested the genius flavor Hydrox with Cookie Dough in 2008. Prior Art.
Do you still make Chocolate Sluggo? It is one of my all-time favorite flavors, but it never seems to be on the board when I come by. I had a Bananas Foster microsundae last time & it was amazing.