That’s an often asked question and it's a tough one…I love ice cream and each flavour we make, becomes my new favourite! But there are two that are especially close to my heart – Strawberry and Belgian Dark Chocolate. These are the first two flavours I made. The added challenge was to make a vegan ice cream, a sugar free ice cream & a low calorie ice cream all-in-one, while using real fruit, real chocolate and only natural ingredients; plus taste awesome.
Strawberries come to us every season in heaped red cratefulls spilling over the Tangelo kitchens. The whole kitchen is a sea of red strawberries being washed, hulled and frozen. I loved being there and popping a few of the juicy fruit into my mouth as all hands worked. So I began with this fruit ice cream.
Chocolate came a close second. Cocoa is the food of the Gods and the rich heady aroma of melting cocoa mass is stupefyingly delicious. Belgian Dark Chocolate Ice Cream in its many iterations of vegan, sugar free, fudge cake and tangerine was a beautiful task.
These flavours were my initiation into the scientific art of making ice cream. I cut my teeth on them. I learned how ingredients worked together, I learned about texture and balance and freezing points. I spent days sitting atop a freezer with my laptop working on recipes – tasting, checking and modifying, and along the way, fell in love with making ice cream. The task was fourfold - vegan ice cream, sugar free ice cream, low calorie ice cream using real fruit & chocolate with only natural ingredients and tasting awesome. Striving for awesome kept me on top of that freezer day after day.
So, while we’ve made many flavours since, these two bring back memories of my first time in the ice cream kitchen.