Mary Canales and Laura Howard, both artisan ice-cream makers in northern California, came to their craft in very different ways. But they share more than a passion for the purest ingredients and traditional production methods. Both women have childhood memories of making ice-cream using old-fashioned, hand-cranked wooden churns.The one that belonged to Howard’s grandmother in West Virginia is now displayed on a shelf in the small, red-painted barn in rural Sonoma, from where Howard runs La Loo’s, the only company in the world making gourmet ice-cream from goat’s milk.Tubs of the ice-cream that she and her team create from scratch and by hand are lined up on a nearby shelf. The names have a whimsical, Victorian ring to them: there’s Vanilla Snowflake, Chocolate Cabernet, Molasses Tipsycake, Strawberry Darling and Lemon Chiffon.
Founded four years ago, La Loo’s, which sources its milk from local goat farms and other ingredients from organic farms close by, has garnered an enthusiastic following. The ice-cream is rich and creamy, without the “goaty” tang one might expect, and the flavours are punchy. As an added bonus, it can legitimately claim to be much healthier than conventional ice-cream. It is high in vitamins A and D and low in lactose, which makes it appealing to those who need to avoid dairy products. It also has less than half the fat of cow’s milk ice-cream.
This may explain why health-conscious Hollywood celebrities such as Kate Hudson and Jim Carrey have been spotted tucking tubs of La Loo’s into their shopping totes. One of La Loo’s most successful retail outlets is the fashionable Whole Foods store in New York’s Union Square.
Howard’s journey to ice-cream making has been unorthodox. Four years ago she was living in Los Angeles working as a film and commercials producer. Searching for a way to live a different life, and inspired by a yoga teacher, she embarked on a one-year “cleansing” diet that involved giving up alcohol, dairy products and caffeine. She found ice-cream particularly difficult to forsake. “I used to eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s every couple of days so I really missed it,” she says.
On the hunt for a substitute, she chanced upon unpasteurised goat’s milk yoghurt in a farmers’ market in Santa Barbara. Howard loved it and was struck by the number of people with medical conditions who were lining up to buy it. She decided to try to use goat’s milk to make ice-cream.
“I didn’t do a lot of research; I just dived in and made it,” she says. The result was a hit with friends at Howard’s dinner parties. But it wasn’t until she made a trip to Tuscany to produce a commercial that she thought of turning a pastime into a business. It was there that she met her future husband, Douglas Gayeton, a documentary maker and photographer who was working on a film about the Slow Food movement. Accompanying him on visits to small farms and artisan food producers, she decided she wanted to live just that sort of life. “It was illuminating and romantic. I wanted to be a part of that world,” she says.
Back in the US, Howard homed in on Sonoma, not least because its landscape, climate and culture of food and wine bear similarities to that of Tuscany. “I drove around looking for goats,” she says, and discovered Redwood Hill Farm, which specialises in goat’s milk yoghurt and Laura Chenel’s Chèvre, which some say makes the best fresh goat’s cheese in America. She had found her spot.
The first flavour Howard launched was Black Mission Fig because she had always served figs with goat’s cheese. La Loo’s now has 10 ice-cream flavours and a line of frozen yoghurt that includes concoctions such as Brownie and Clyde and the caramel and toffee-laced Cajeta de Leche. Working with a handful of small bio-diverse farms, Howard is expanding manufacturing across the country. “The most important thing for me is a sustainable farm full of happy goats,” she says. “I want to make a beautiful product, but a big part of why it’s successful for me is that it’s at one with the environment.”
Fifty miles south of Sonoma, in the university city of Berkeley, Mary Canales can certainly claim membership of northern California’s gastronomic elite. Two years ago she opened Ici Ice Cream, a small, white-tiled ice-cream parlour serving intriguing flavours such as Burnt Caramel, Peach Sorbet with Habanero Chili and Prune Armagnac, all served on delicate, hand-rolled tuile cones. Before setting up on her own, Canales worked for nine years as pastry chef at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ world-famous restaurant in Berkeley, and before that she cooked at Oliveto’s, another highly regarded restaurant in San Francisco’s Bay Area.
While at Chez Panisse, Canales reported briefly to head pastry chef Lindsey Remolif Shere. Author of Chez Panisse Desserts, Shere was an inspiration for Canales. “We would tie in seasonality and gardening, fruit and fruit varieties and, although we were making simple food, it tasted good because the ingredients were of such high quality,” she says.
Canales dreamed of opening “a little dessert shop” like the Italian gelateria she sought out on her travels, their glass cabinets filled with ice cream gateaux and frozen bombes. She recognised the fact that there is a nostalgia associated with ice cream and wanted to recreate the tastes of her childhood. “I thought everyone had had that experience of using a hand-cranked ice-cream maker,” she says. It was when she opened Ici and talked with the numerous customers who quickly became regulars that she realised it wasn’t the case.
At Ici, Canales’s team toils in the tiny kitchen behind the store-front, hand-rolling 2,600 cones a week – the tips of which offer a bite of chocolate – and creating from scratch the ice-cream bases that serve to make the finished product. The choices are announced on handwritten signs hung from ribbons on the tiled walls of the shop.
Apart from chocolate and vanilla, which are constants on the menu, the flavours change daily according to the season. Autumn choices feature nuts and candied orange, and might include huckleberry, persimmon, honey saffron and pumpkin. As Christmas approaches, the wooden freezer cabinet will fill up with baked Alaskas, Yule logs and holiday cookies. Nothing is set is stone, however. Canales says that if a farmer calls to say he has some wonderful Concord grapes, she will devise an ice cream made with them.
Bay Area foodies have embraced Ici and people are often to be seen queuing up outside the store to round off their evening with a scoop of something delicious, cold and sweet.
But Canales says one of her motivations when she left Chez Panisse was to be able to offer her desserts to a broader audience. She realised she might have succeeded with this goal when two teenaged skateboarders came into Ici and one said to the other: “Dude, you’ve got to try the rose pistachio. It’s awesome.”
La Loo’s, www.goatmilkicecream.com
Ici Ice Cream,www.ici-icecream.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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Financial Times, August 18, 2007
FROM ALICE’S TO A PLACE OF THEIR OWN
Former employees of leading Californian chef Alice Waters are echoing her values in restaurants in the Bay Area, says Tracey Taylor
Mary Jo Thorensen was 24 when she was taken on as an apprentice pastry chef at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ acclaimed restaurant in Berkeley, California. Now she has a restaurant of her own, Thorensen still remembers the inspiring work ethic at Chez Panisse and Waters’ constant efforts to “get that wonderful little thing”. “There was one old gentleman who supplied Alice with raspberries,” she says. “It was the only thing he had. They came in these little baskets with just the right-sized piece of wax paper in them. And they were perfect.”
Steve Sullivan began working as a busboy at Chez Panisse in 1975. He remembers the experience of being asked to take a dish back to the kitchen. “Alice would say: ‘Bring it over here - what’s wrong with it?’ She wouldn’t say: ‘Those customers are philistines’.” While at the restaurant, Sullivan developed a passion for breadmaking that led him to open Acme Bakery in San Francisco in 1983. His crusty sourdoughs and pains au levain are much sought-after among Bay Area foodies. Sullivan says he took with him Waters’ belief in the value of creating strong bonds - with staff, suppliers andcustomers.
Waters herself says she places a premium on good relationships. “I always hire someone I like, or a friend. When you are working long hours, it’s not just professional skills that matter. You want to find the right chemistry and be able to inspire each other. That’s what makes good things happen in a restaurant.”
Thorensen opened her own restaurant eight years ago. A much-loved local haunt in Oakland’s Piedmont Avenue neighbourhood, Jojo is tiny and its open kitchen allows customers to observe first-hand the calm and methodical manner in which Thorensen and her team work. The French country-inspired menu might include flat-iron steak served with anchovy-mustard butter and frites, and an apple candied Meyer lemon tart.
Like the many others who have honed their craft as members of Chez Panisse’s kitchen brigade, Thorensen credits Waters with shaping much of her thinking about food and how to prepare it. Certainly most of the restaurants and food businesses founded by Waters’ protégés emulate her commitment to sourcing organic produce and sustainably raised meat and fish - espoused long before the practice became fashionable - her attention to detail and her collaborative approach to running a kitchen.
“Honouring the ingredient” is a key Waters mantra. “Everyone who passes through Chez Panisse learns that one important thing,” says Paul Bertolli who was head chef at Chez Panisse for 10 years, ran the highly regarded Bay Area restaurant Oliveto for 12 years and recently founded his own artisanal salami company. “The first thing I knew when I set up Fra’Mani was that I had to find a great supplier of pork,” he says. Bertolli scoured America’s Midwest to locate farmers who were breeding hogs in a natural way and were concernedabout quality. “That was totally inspired by my work at Chez Panisse,” he says.
Waters’ roots are in the San Francisco Bay Area so it is not surprising that many of her alumni have not strayed far - that, and the fact that it is known as a food-lovers’ destination. Christopher Lee, also a former Chez Panisse head chef, now runs Eccolo on Berkeley’s fashionable Fourth Street. With its retractable roof for al fresco eating and zinc bar, the vibe is casual smart and the menu focuses on the best of Italy’s regional cuisines - thick cut veal chop with marrow sauce and artichokes al cartoccio comes cooked over almond, oak and Manzanita woods for instance. Lee says he has sought to learn from the way Waters managed her kitchen. “The old style French kitchen could be a hard place where everyone was badly treated,” he says. “That’s changed a lot since Alice Waters. It’s hard work in her kitchen but it’s a gentler place. The relationships are collegiate rather than hierarchical.”
Charlie Hallowell was 21 when he started work at Chez Panisse, ordering pantry items and checking inventory. He now runs Pizzaiolo, a buzzy Italian restaurant in Oakland’s Temescal district with a loyal clientele and in the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of Top 100 Bay Area restaurants for the three years since it opened. A former hardware store, the restaurant has an appealing rough edge with exposed brick walls, scarred wood floors anda giant wood-fire which turns outdelicious thin-crust blistered pizzas, as well as regional specialities suchas pork shoulder braised in red wine with polenta.
Italian dishes and top quality ingredients are also on the menu at Michael Tusk’s restaurant, Quince, in San Francisco. Tusk, another Waters protégé, earned a Michelin star this year for his menu which features home-madepastas such as pumpkin lasagnette and pici with goose ragu. The elegant but unpretentious restaurant is housed in a former apothecary in Pacific Heights.
Zuni Café, opened in 1987, probably captures the pulse of San Francisco better than any. Politicians, artists, celebrities and families are drawn to the vibrant, brasserie-style corner spot to enjoy classics such as roast chicken and Caesar salad as well as dishes inspired by the cuisines of Provence, Tuscany and Catalonia. It is run by Judy Rodgers and Gilbert Pilgram, both Chez Panisse veterans.
Then there’s Foreign Cinema which couldn’t be more different than Chez Panisse where co-owner Gayle Pirie worked for four years, but the emphasis on local ingredients and meat from sustainable ranches is straight from her mentor’s bible. Movies are projected on to the back wall of the enormous terrace at this hip Mission District restaurant which Pirie runs with her partner John Clark.
These days Waters dedicates some of her time to the Chez Panisse Foundation, one of whose programmes, the Edible Schoolyard, teaches school-children to grow and cook their own food. She is also a prominent member of the Slow Food movement. While she clearly has a devoted following, she is not necessarily regarded as a crusader with disciples in tow.
“She is neither a preacher nor an evangelist - quite the contrary,” says Jonathan Waxman, who worked with Alice Waters and fellow chef Jean-Pierre Moullé at Chez Panisse in the restaurant’s heady early days in the 1970s and went on to introduce Californian cuisine to New York. “In this business there are a lot of egotistical people and, in that respect, Alice is a breath of fresh air.” The menu at Barbuto, Waxman’s Italian/Mediterranean restaurant in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, has been described as “aggressively seasonal”. Choices might include Eaton farm’s Berkshire pork chop with rocket and rhubarb chutney. With some partners, Waxman has recently opened a new restaurant, the West Country Grill in Sonoma, California.
Waters herself says she regards the network of Chez Panisse graduates who are carrying forth the spirit and philosophy of her restaurant as an extended family. “I am very proud of them. They have expanded so far beyond what I imagined,” she says.
