Tracey Taylor

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

At The Blue Plate, a popular bistro in the Mission district of San Francisco, chilled water is offered in old-fashioned, heavy glass milk bottles. Across the Bay at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Alice Waters thought carefully before choosing decanters etched with the restaurant’s name in which to serve filtered water, still or lightly carbonated in-house, according to customer preference.

What you won’t find at either restaurant is the once ubiquitous bottle of Perrier or San Pellegrino. Selecting one’s brand of mineral water may once have been considered as important a decision as choosing the right wine, but those days may be numbered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Environmental concerns are the main motivation – both the perceived unnecessary food miles involved in shipping water from France, Italy or Fiji, and the impact of clogging landfill sites with plastic bottles.

Earlier this year the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, a former restaurateur himself, called for city restaurants to serve tap water. This followed his decision to cut the city’s budget for bottled water last year, saving an annual $500,000 (£323,000).

To some in the business, Newsom’s request was viewed as political gesturing because a number of restaurant owners had long since ditched the bottle.

“I don’t think he should be congratulated for advocating something that should have been done years ago,” says Mark Pastore who owns Incanto, where bottled water has never been on the menu.

Since it opened six years ago, this popular neighbourhood spot in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, has served free filtered, chilled water, no ice. Pastore says the primary reason is hospitality.

“I wanted to remove that awkward moment when the customer is confronted with the choice between tap or bottled,” he says.

Pastore says the Bay Area is fortunate in having excellent water on tap. The quality of the water that flows from the foothills of the Sierras and supplies much of the Bay Area is said to be among the best in the nation. When the American Waterworks Association Research Foundation recently tested 20 water systems around the country for compounds used in medicines, household cleaners and cosmetics, it found San Francisco’s water almost alone in being free of contaminants.

Old habits die hard, however, and Americans drink more bottled water than milk, coffee or beer. It’s a $16bn (£10bn) industry and restaurant sales make up about 6 per cent of that.

Pastore says he hasn’t had any complaints, particularly once customers understand what is being offered and why. And it’s been nothing but positive feedback from diners at Chez Panisse too, says restaurant manager, Mike Kossa-Rienzi, who says it used to get through 25,000 bottles of San Benedetto a year before it switched to filtered tap water in 2006.

Even as more eco-conscious customers embrace the trend, there is likely to be residual resistance from restaurants with an eye on the bottom line. A restaurant can price a bottle it has bought for $1 or $2 for between $5 and $10. That is a much higher profit margin than for wine which, typically, is marked up by around 200-300 per cent. Mayor Newsom conceded this when he acknowledged that not every restaurant would be able to afford to take bottled water off the menu.

Financial pressure on the industry has been exacerbated by wage inflation and food costs, as well as diminishing sales volume, according to Kevin Westlye, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. For Westlye the issue is also one of choice.

“Restaurants must please their customers and that means offering the widest choice, including bottled water for those who prefer it,” he says.

He believes, however, that most restaurants are evaluating how to become more sustainable. At upscale seafood restaurant Aqua in downtown San Francisco, the majority of patrons have traditionally favoured Norwegian Voss spring water at $8.50 a bottle. But Renee Simms, speaking for the restaurant, says more than half their customers now order tap water and the management decided to switch to a local bottled water.

“It just seems smarter,” she says.