Salt & Straw Announces 2016 Summer Ice Cream Series Line-Up

SALT & STRAW ANNOUNCES 2016 SUMMER ICE CREAM SERIES LINE-UP

New June, July and August ice cream flavors from the Salt & Straw kitchen explore the nuanced flavors of fermentation and the bounty of local berries and farmer’s markets

Salt & Straw, the iconic Portland-based, family-run ice cream purveyor known for its artisanal, chef-driven approach to an American classic, will be featuring a series of limited edition seasonal menus at scoop shops in Portland and Los Angeles this summer. The seasonal menus rotate every four weeks, vary by market and showcase the compelling stories of what is happening in each community. Starting in June Salt & Straw brings fermentation to the forefront, creatively using sourdough, fish sauce and fermented honey for the flavor-packed fermentation series. Throughout the month, explore the nuanced flavors that can be achieved through fermentation, beyond just salty and funky. In July, the summer berry bounty will steal the show, from the marionberry to the blackberry. Lastly in August, Salt & Straw will work with the community of local farmers and producers on a suite of flavors available in neighborhood scoop shops from green fennel and maple to caramel corn on the cob. Each flavor in the series features fresh, locally grown ingredients, as well as a few from farms working to make fresh produce equitably accessible to all. Flavors rotate each month and are available locally at Salt & Straw scoop shops, the Portland monthly flavors are available for national shipping.

JUNE FERMENTATION SERIES

Salt & Straw is constantly playing with themes of ice cream flavors to showcase in month long experiments. Over the past couple years they have been enthralled with the nuanced flavors that can be achieved through fermentation…beyond just salty and funky, it can bring out the floral qualities in a honey, the acidic qualities in a cherry, the fruity flavors in an anchovy. This menu is a collection of flavors that present fermentation in a new light, one that honors the beauty of allowing really amazing ingredients to age for months in the perfect condition and then scooping them into the perfect ice cream flavor.

Portland June Menu

Sourdough w/ Chocolate & Strawberries

The incarnation of what we imagine every Italian actually eats for breakfast. The ice cream is made of Sourdough, with all it’s fermented tartness and malty-ness, with a gentle smear of liquified chocolate and strawberry jam. The ice cream itself is as pleasantly sour as walking into a bakery at five in the morning thanks to a house fermented sourdough mom we’ve created specifically for this ice cream and candied sourdough “croutons”. Ribbons of jam and chocolate slowly drool from each scoop with the same tenacity that you’ll drool over each bite.

Bretta Fermented Cherries

A heady house-fermenting process that could only be achieved with lots of help from our friends at Breakside Brewery. Bretta is one of the most unique strains of beer brewing yeasts you’ll find; it creates an acidity in beers that, if gone unchecked, is terrifyingly tart leaving most beers unservable let alone drinkable. Why would we ever dream of using bretta in an ice cream? Because, if done correctly, fermentation via bretta yeast can produce one of the most beautiful flavors we’ve ever dreamed of…. think rich smoky leather combined with fruity bubble gum and ripe pears. To make this ice cream Breakside Brewery first fermented a bretta-yeast based beer for us to use as a starter that we then pour over fresh cherries, let everything sit for a week or two and cross our fingers. The beauty of this ice cream is its affirmation of simplicity.

Fish Sauce Caramel w/ Palm Sugar

Fermented anchovy sauce meets its lusciously sweet, candied destiny. FINALLY. The secret to why this ice cream is so delicious is the meticulous approach we took to pairing the salty fermented delicacy with ingredients that would be grown nearby. SE asian palm sugar and molasses help to make for a combination that, somehow, just makes sense as the perfect ice cream flavor.

Honey Vinegar Milk Sorbet

Local honey fermented in Portland by our dear friends at PokPok. We love this milk sorbet because of it’s sheer simplicity. PokPok creates a cane sugar and honey fermented vinegar that fills your soul with yummy-ness. Not messing with perfection, we merely mix this vinegar with a dash of milk and a pinch of zested grapefruit and pop it in our ice cream machines.

Dill Pickle Sorbet

Before we go any further, let’s clear things up… is pickle juice drinking a guilty pleasure for anyone else??? We keep our pickles nice and easy by highlighting the lighter and sweeter side of the pickle’s acids, focusing on spices that are much more pastry-forward like dill and fennel, and stopping the fermentation while the cucumbers still have that bright freshness to them. All of our work goes into making these pickles and not covering up how delicious these fresh cucumbers are; we simply juice the pickled cucumbers and spin into a sorbet. We’re gambling a bit that there are lots of others out there who also drink pickle juice by the glassful.

LA June Menu

California Avocado & Cardamom w/ Fermented Carrot Custard

Celebrating California avocado month with a blast of flavor. We teamed up with Jessica Kaslow at Sqirl in Silverlake to create this flavor. Her recipe for avocado cardamom ice cream is, quite literally, mind blowingly delicious and we did everything we could to not mess with perfection. With that said, we wanted to dirty the recipe up a bit by swirling in our own housemade fermented carrot custard. The carrot pudding is slightly musky and completely intoxicating; it pulls on all of your senses and makes you want more; it’s odd, terrifying, delicious, and completely enthralling.

Sourdough w/ Chocolate & Strawberries

The incarnation of what we imagine every Italian actually eats for breakfast. The ice cream is made of sourdough, with all it’s fermented tartness and malty-ness, with a gentle smear of liquified chocolate and strawberry jam. The ice cream itself is as pleasantly sour as walking into a bakery at five in the morning thanks to a house fermented sourdough mom we’ve created specifically for this ice cream and candied sourdough “croutons”. Ribbons of jam and chocolate slowly drool from each scoop with the same tenacity that you’ll drool over each bite.

Fish Sauce Caramel w/ Palm Sugar

Dill Pickle Sorbet

JULY BERRIES, BERRIES, BERRIES! SERIES

July demands berries, and, in turn, berries demand to be made into delicious treats without compromising any of their wonderful, essential berry integrity. The whole trick is to not mess that up. Oregon and Los Angeles are home to some of the best berries in the world and Salt & Straw is delighted to showcase them in these pro-berry flavors.

Portland July Menu

Portland Creamery’s Goat Cheese Marionberry Habanero

Back by popular polite discourse, this refreshing and summery flavor has been perfected in its fourth year (but it’s still h-o-t spells hot!). It starts with Portland Creamery’s “Sweet Fire” goat cheese, which literally comes to us three days after being milked. This smooth, creamy chevre is churned into a tart, creamy goat cheese ice cream and ribboned with a thick, blazing, so sweet marionberry jam that has been infused with fiery habaneros. You may, on occasion, get potently thwacked by a lick of habanero, but it makes the next lick so much sweeter for drama of it all. Not to brag, but we got our hands on some of the best goat cheese ever to come out of the WIllamette Valley. Portland Creamery handcrafts its “Sweet Fire” flavored chevre under the benignly interested gaze of a much loved, multiply-awarded, and freely roaming herd of goats in Molalla, Oregon.

Ancient Heritage’s Fresh Cheese & Strawberries

A study of Portland’s unique urban cheese-eries. This flavor was designed to feature our SE Portland neighbors, Ancient Heritage Dairy. We love Ancient Heritage because they are completely re-imagining how to make cheese, building cheese-aging-caves in the heart of the city, and becoming an anchor in our growing dairy community. This ice cream uses their fresh cow’s cheese, Ava. It’s our take on a local “cheesecake-y” ice cream with a slight ribbon of housemade strawberry jam.

Roasted Black Raspberries & Toasted White Chocolate

A summer valentine. Sweet, mellow, white chocolate is toasted, caramelizing the chocolate and creating a sort of chocolate dulce de leche ice cream envelope for this full-hearted black raspberry love letter. Fresh Oregon black raspberries are sprinkled with sugar and a little salt, and roasted to bring a dark, rich, deep fruit satisfaction in jammy raspberry swirls. We get some beautiful Oregon black raspberries this time of year in big flats at the Portland Farmers Market. Walking out of there with thousands of amazing berries, you just feel rich.

Gin Spiced Blackberry Jam & Chocolate Chips

Since pouring gin over your blackberries is a relative no brainer… After getting the secret gin spice blend from our friends at House Spirits for their legendary Aviation Gin, we’ve been going crazy with different ways to integrate the flavors into our favorite foods. In this case, we’ve infused the gin into both an Oregon Blackberry jam and infused the spices into a simple vanilla ice cream; we paired everything with thinly shaved dark chocolate and churned everything together. The result, delicate and spicy ice cream chased with a berry sweetness that almost washes the gin away.

PNW Wild-Foraged Berry Sherbet

We kept things super simple; fold fresh berries into a bit of cream & sugar, pop it into our ice cream machines, and let the amazing berries just do their thing. And where do we get these amazing wild berries?… So there’s this guy, Tom, right? And he forages all over Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier for berries. Wild mountain blueberries and blackberries and whatever other berries he finds. Could be huckleberries. Or lingonberries. Mystery berries, maybe even. Anyway, we get as many of these berries as we can from Tom from NW Wild Foods, and that’s that.

LA July Menu

Birthday Cakes & Blackberries

The freedom to eat cake in your ice cream. We declare this ice cream your official holiday from adulthood. It tastes like freaking frosting, the better to feature the chunky hunks of three-vanilla cake and swirls of home-made straight-arrow Evergreen blackberry jam. Whirled with non-organic, bright-as-you-remember Technicolor sprinkles, we dedicate this flavor to the discerning palates of children who know that sometimes cake ice cream is exactly what’s called for.

Strawberry w/ Cilantro Lime Cheesecake

A godly trifecta when it comes to unusual pairings, this is the perfect use of the strong sweetness that fresh, sun-ripened California strawberries bring to the plate. That tartness from limes, spicy peppery-ness from cilantro, and unapologetic sweetness from strawberries combine seamlessly to help us taste the true nuances of the berries.

Honey Vinegar w/ Raspberry Fig Cobbler

A glorious food fight between cobbler and ice cream, with two winners. OK. You’ve heard us say this before, but sometimes the simple thing is just so good that you really just want to get out of the way of it. In this case, we are talking about fig cobbler and ice cream. We literally just bake big slabs of fig cobbler and hand-chunk them into a honey vinegar ice cream. Why combine honey, raspberry, and figs… you ask? Because that’s what nature wanted and why question the inevitable.

Meyer Lemon Buttermilk w/ Blueberries

A lemony ice-cream nap. There is just something truly soothing about this ice cream, something so comforting and comfortable and good. We start with a Meyer lemon ice cream that is round and warming, not tart and acidic. Buttermilk adds a little sweet-tart, and more roundness. For added relishing, blueberries are whirled in to deliver pops of juicy-sweet summer-ness. Kick back. Eat this. Kick more back.

PNW Wild-Foraged Berry Sherbet

Freshly imported from the Pacific Northwest, these berries are so perfect, so berry-y, so aromatic and rich in color… we just had to bring them down to LA with us. For the ice cream itself, we kept things super simple; fold fresh berries into a bit of cream & sugar, pop it into our ice cream machines, and let the amazing berries just do their thing. And where do we get these amazing wild berries?… So there’s this guy, Tom, right? And he forages all over Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier for berries. Wild mountain blueberries and blackberries and whatever other berries he finds. Could be huckleberries. Or lingonberries. Mystery berries, maybe even. Anyway, we get as many of these berries as we can from Tom from NW Wild Foods, and that’s that.

AUGUST SUMMER FARMER’S MARKET SERIES

Salt & Straw’s August ice cream menu pushes forward into a bold new frontier where farm-to-table zealots squeal in delight and farm-fresh vegetables are delivered in the form of frozen cylindrical magic. Slashing the arbitrary boundaries of fruits & veggies & ice cream, this menu is an exploration of the curiousity between sweet, savory, earthy, and refined.

Portland August Menu

Caramel Corn on the Cob

Golden sumptuousness. We lightly sautee fresh corn kernels in a bit of salted brown butter, juice the kernels and add a bit of cream… allowing the sweetness of the corn to be the star of the show. The resulting ice cream is voluptuous in flavor and seductive in color. Tender ribbons of caramel find themselves drizzled into this ice cream; not to interfere with the corn-y flavor but to only help the ice cream melt in your mouth just a little faster.

Carrot Cake Batter & Pralined Hazelnuts

An excuse to have your (carrot) cake and eat it too. Have you ever kind of wanted to eat cake…or, wanted to eat ice cream… but then thought, nah, I should eat vegetables. Well we’re here to say you can have it all. This ice cream is brimming and dense. We can’t promise this ice cream will satiate your daily nutritional requirements but can promise that it will satiate your daily yummy-ness requirements.

Green Fennel & Maple

Woah, these fennel bulbs are so plump they’ll make you blush! Fresh fennel from Sauvie Island Organics is slowly steeped in Vermont maple syrup. We love Sauvie Island Organics because, on top of growing amazing organic produce, they run a scholarship program that provides a yearly supply of fresh produce to families all around Portland that otherwise would not have access to healthy food. The maple syrup we use in this ice cream is pretty unique because Morse Farms in Vermont has been in the family for over 200 years! We’ve tasted a lot of maple syrup in our days, and this is the best!

Zucchini Bread w/ Chocolate Freckles

Yummmm, zucchini bread. The destitute destiny of all that zucchini we so ambitiously planted in early spring. Our zucchini bread ice cream is lavishly packed with cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg layered with massive hunky hunks of tender zucchini bread and a buckshot of tiny freckles of single-origin, Portland roasted chocolate. We love this ice cream for the sheer ingenuity of something so basic yet so darn delicious.

Roasted Parsnip & Banana Sorbet

After a long roast, these summer parsnips begin to soften to the texture of custard with the sweet caramelized flavors of bourbon and vanilla. So… why wouldn’t these be the perfect pairing for bananas? In fact, in Britain during WWII when bananas weren’t available they would use roasted parsnips as “mock bananas”. While that straight substitution sounds not-so-fun, the pairing is ingenious. The bananas and parsnips dance with each other mimicking each other with sweet spiciness. We added a hint of clove & cinnamon to help nudge this sorbet into a recipe that’s unforgettable.

LA August Menu

Caramel Corn on the Cob

Eggplant Honey Custard

This one’ll make you want to stick your face in the bucket, soaking in the glorious sweetness of honey, soft creaminess of southern california eggplants with skin as squeaky as a dolphin, and the fatty dense richness of a yolk-y custard ice cream. A dash of freshly microplaned nutmeg helps pull everything together making this flavor pairing surprisingly simple and delicate; without any of the flavors particularly overwhelming the other.

Green Fennel & Maple

Woah, these fennel bulbs are so plump they’ll make you blush! We steep and juice every part of the fennel stalk to stern including the seeds, pollen, everything. When combined with maple, the pleasant astringency of the fennel can be fully appreciated for it’s full culinary glory. The maple syrup we use in this ice cream is pretty unique because Morse Farms in Vermont has been in the family for over 200 years. We’ve tasted a lot of maple syrup in our days, and this is the best!

Strawberry Tomato Water Sherbet

We’re timid to call this a flavor pairing because instead of complimenting each other, strawberries and tomatoes harmoniously echo each other. In fact, vine-ripened tomatoes from Southern Cali are so freaking sweet, plump, and aromatic that they provoke more “strawberry-ness” than most (actual) strawberries you’ll find in the grocery store. We lightly roast strawberries and bright red, drool-inducing tomatoes with a hint of sugar just until they begin to break down. Together, the strawberries and tomatoes go straight into the ice cream machine to produce a perfectly bright, fruity sorbet.

California Avocado & Hazelnut Praline Sorbet

Two ingredients with flavors as delicate as can be. By lightly roasting, candying and pureeing hazelnuts and folding them into ripened and pureed avocados, our goal with this flavor was to make a combination that honors the nutty-ness of these crazy delicious California avocados. And this ice cream doesn’t merely honor the avocado… nay! This sorbet is the epitomistic tribute to all of avocado’s glory. This sorbet is like a stick of butter on a (avocado) tree limb bathing in crystal nuts. This sorbet is like rubbing your face in velvet while petting a small puppy goldendoodle. This sorbet will eternally alter your expectation of what a ripe avocado will taste like.

About Salt & Straw Ice Cream

Salt & Straw Ice Cream is a chef-driven ice cream kitchen with scoop shops in Portland and Los Angeles that partners with local artisans, producers and farmers to serve unusually creative and absolutely delicious ice cream. Each ice cream is handmade in small batches using only all natural cream from local farms in each city. Flavors showcase the best local, organic and sustainable ingredients from Oregon and Southern California farmers and artisans as well as imported flavors from small hand-picked farms from around the world. The company started in Portland, OR serving eight flavors from an ice cream cart in May of 2011 and now has three scoop shops in Portland and two in LA. In spring of 2016, Salt & Straw will open the Wiz Bang Bar at Pine Street Market, a brand new concept featuring a 10-seat chef’s counter, soft serve ice cream, novelties and plated desserts. Scoops of handmade, small batch ice creams, sundaes, milkshakes and floats as well as pints to go are available at each with an ice cream sommelier of sorts who will gladly take you through a tasting of all the flavors. Favorites, seasonal, design your own variety packs and pint club memberships are available for online purchase and can be shipped anywhere in the United States. Salt & Straw’s ice cream cart is available for catering parties and events.

Find more information at www.saltandstraw.com or call 971-271-8168.

Twitter and Instagram: @SaltandStraw.