NEW YORK (AP) — If you're intimidated by the idea of making ice cream at home, just think of it as making soup. That's advice from Tyler Malek of Salt & Straw, the innovative gourmet ice cream maker known for its ever-changing lick-able treats.
"Making a pint of ice cream is very similar to making a pot of soup where if you have a good stock recipe — like chicken stock, vegetable stock — then you start just adding to it until it tastes good," he says from his kitchen in Portland, Oregon.
"If you have really good stock base recipe, you could blend strawberries into it and make strawberry ice cream. You can drizzle chocolate into it and make chocolate ice cream. You can do really anything."
The base is the base
That ice cream base is also at the heart of Malek's latest cookbook, " America's Most Iconic Ice Creams: A Salt & Straw Cookbook." Just as another summer beckons, he and co-author JJ Goode teach the fundamentals, which then can be built on to make all kinds of delicious treats.
That means learning the bases for gelato, custard, sorbet, coconut and ice cream. Only down the road can you confidently turn them into awesome flavors like Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper, or Banana Parsnip Sherbet.
"My dream, at its heart, is that someone can take this book and they just pore through it and have so much fun and then it ignites this Pandora's box of imagination," Malek says.
The cookbook focuses on 10 iconic flavors: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, coffee, green tea, pistachio, cookie dough, salted caramel, cereal and rum raisin. Once you've mastered their "core principles in flavor, in technique," Malek says, "you can just go wild."
And wild it gets in the cookbook, with flavors like Toasted Sourdough, Chocolate and EVOO, and Lemon Earl Grey Shortbread.
"We wanted it to feel like you were imported into our R&D test kitchen and you could feel like you're writing recipes beside us and understanding why we're testing this and adding more salt or adding more sweetness," he says.
Take salted caramel, which most people think is salty and sweet.
"They're completely wrong," Malek says, laughing. "It's salty sweet and bitter. Once you get that flavor trinity, you start understanding that the combination of salty, sweet and bitter can completely open your eyes to different combinations."
New flavors every month
Malek and his cousin, Kim, became ice cream entrepreneurs in 2011 when they opened a small food cart in Portland. Since then, they've expanded to over 40 stores in seven states, becoming known for their refreshing and off-beat approach and rotating menu, with new flavors added every month.
Other flavors have included Malted Potato Chip Cupcake and Black Olive Brittle and Goat Cheese. For Thanksgiving, they once offered Caramelized Turkey & Cranberry Sauce. "I've written 2,500 recipes and maybe 20,000 fails," says Malek.
Salt & Straw leans on xanthan gum, which Malek uses to combat "heat shock," when ice cream melts and freezes again into bigger crystals. ("It's as innocuous as cornstarch or baking soda," he writes.) He also harnesses the power of acids, like citric, malic and tartaric, calling them "an ice cream maker's secret weapon."
"I think he is part scientist — maybe a mad scientist — and part artist," says Clarkson Potter editor Francis Lam, who with Susan Roxborough helped craft the book. Lam first encountered Salt & Straw when he ate their prosciutto ice cream at an event in Portland. At another event, he had their sea urchin flavor and felt compelled to meet Malek.
"He's one of these people who doesn't shut down an idea before he runs with it for a little bit," Lam said.
'My passion is in learning'
Salt & Straw is part of an artisanal ice cream boom in recent years that includes companies like Van Leeuwen, Gelato Fiasco, Lick Honest Ice Creams, Morgenstern's and Wanderlust Creamery.
Malek has leaned on partners for innovations; he and a doughnut maker in Florida, for instance, created a cream cheese ice cream with glazed brioche doughnut chunks and guava curd. He has interned at breweries to learn the ins and outs of beer making to incorporate it into his desserts.
"My passion is in learning and storytelling. If I weren't making ice cream, my dream job was always to be a travel writer," says Malek. "I had no idea when we first started the company that ice cream is like the coolest medium to channel that through because it really is like writing a story through every single ice cream."
He learned that different regions of the country have their blind spots; when Salt & Straw opened in Los Angeles, few knew what rhubarb was. At the same time, he didn't know there were different types of avocados.
Another tip borrowed from soup: As with soup bases, Malek says, home cooks should make big batches of different ice cream bases, separate them into containers and freeze them.
"Then when you're ready to make ice cream, defrost it in your microwave real quick and blend in your strawberries that you got fresh from the farmer's market and make strawberry ice cream," he says. "That's the trick: to make ice cream within a day or literally within hours of finding a really special ingredient."
