Ice Cream is a Base Product: Bill St. John on Marczyk's Ice Cream Base

By Bill St. John

Ice cream is a base product.

“Most ice cream makers get their base from one of the big dairies,” says Pete Marczyk. “You can make good ice cream that way—a lot of ice cream makers do—but the ice cream also can turn out very, very sweet, even gummy,” due to a high level of various sugars.

An ice cream’s base is, really, more than merely a base. Sure, what is added to it (cocoa for chocolate, say, or vanilla extracts for vanilla) may dominate as the ice cream’s major flavor. But because of its role, the constitution of the base itself matters muchly.

It’s like preparing a canvas with gesso, the white, paint-like sealant on a canvas. Without it, all the colors that you add later would fade into the weave. But with that layer of gesso, the colors show brightly—and that, of course, is the point of your painting.

Isn’t it interesting that, when a painter paints, the most essential thing is something that no one ever sees?

The base for Marczyk’s “Market Made” ice creams is its gesso. Because of it, all the flavors and textures layered on top of it taste better and more alive than they otherwise would. And that base is made from scratch, from only the best and highest quality of ingredients, such as Morning Fresh Dairy’s 18-percent cream, the dairy's whole milk, the yolks (only) of hand-cracked farm eggs, and a wee pinch of sel gris, the famed “grey sea salt” from France.

Marczyk says, “Alice Waters said something along the lines that ‘No dish can be better than its worst ingredient.’ That’s why our base is made of only the best.”

Perfecting the base for Marczyk Fine Foods Ice Cream took a long, long time—“months,” Marczyk says. “The overall drivers,” he says, “were that (1) we wanted low sugar—this is ‘adult ice cream,’ not super sweet; (2) we wanted it to be minimally stabilized [avoiding the several ‘gums’ other ice cream makers commonly employ]; and (3) we wanted you to taste the cream.”

I used to make my living assaying and writing about wines; I’ve professionally tasted tens of thousands. I tasted Morning Fresh Dairy’s Cream clean from the bottle, alongside Marczyk’s newest flavor, Lemon Blueberry Buckle. I could taste the cream; oh, Blueberry, I could taste the cream. (I also could feel it and revel in feeling it. These are not experiences one gets with just any ice cream.)

As for the several other flavors of Marczyk’s ice cream, let me assure you that they, too, like their base, use only the best and highest quality ingredients.

For example, “the Vanilla [flavor ice cream] uses three different kinds of vanilla,” says Marczyk, “Madagascar Bourbon—it’s a broad, round ‘vanilla’—then Tahitian, super floral, and finally Mexican, it’s earthy and, well, swarthy.”

The Marczyks don’t use strawberry concentrate for its Strawberry flavor; “we core our own, and they’re ripe,” Marczyk assures. “For the Peanut Butter Fudge, we make our own fudge.”

Yep, this is ice cream for grownups. Beginning with the very base.