Rosewater and cardamom ice-cream  from Moro the Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark
Rosewater and cardamom ice-cream from Moro the Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark

A cone, a dish, a bar—how will you have your ice cream today—the 40th anniversary of Ice Cream Day in Canada?

Canadians, on average, each enjoy about 85 scoops of ice cream a year, about half that of Americans and nowhere near the 500+scoops that New Zealanders consume. Magellan and I are definitely doing our share, more this summer now that he’s discovered Costco sells Häagen-Dazs® ice cream bars for a fraction of their cost at the corner store in our neighbourhood.

What is it that makes us crave, love, scream for ice cream?

Maybe it starts with childhood memories.

Mix them together and you’ve got Neopolitan ice cream (Photo: Cleanpng.com)

In my childhood summers, I could hardly wait for Saturday night and my seven-cent Neapolitan ice-cream cone. (Coincidentally, that was Magellan’s fave as a kid, too. Now he likes caramel, with additions like toffee, coffee and chocolate.) In the icy cold days of winter in Saskatchewan, we spooned out bowlfuls of my dad’s favourite,, butterscotch ripple.

When Magellan and I were first married and living in Calgary, we ate gallons of a very good coconut ice cream made, I think, by Loblaw’s. A few decades later, I bought an ice-cream maker and began experimenting. I made salted-caramel bourbon ice cream, olive oil ice cream, mastic (a resin from a Greek rosemary-like plant) ice cream, fig-leaf ice cream, Vietnamese ice cream…I’m a bit lazier now, more likely to copy Gail’s recipe: buy a carton of your favourite vanilla ice cream, leave it on the counter for ten minutes, stir in finely chopped thyme, basil or rosemary, and refreeze.

Huffington Post did a story on ice cream in Canada by province. Here’s a sampling of their favourite flavours:

Alberta Black Gold Created to “capture the fast-paced, hardworking oilmen of Canada’s cowboy province,” this cup of delicious includes coffee ice cream, fudge, graham pie crust and almonds.

British Columbia Rocky Mountain Landslide Put together some chocolate ice cream, Oreo, chocolate chips and whipped toppings, and you have something that’s meant to emulate the Rocky Mountains. To us, that just sounds like heaven — now all we need is the view.

Nova Scotia Blueberry “Scone’er” Trying to emulate Nova Scotia’s rocky coastline, this Sweet Cream ice cream and graham pie crust combination takes on blueberries and almonds for texture.

Saskatchewan Wheat King Coronation This could be our favourite of the combinations, based on taste alone — this one puts together cake batter ice cream, caramel, yellow cake and — oh yes — Skor bar.

If we had to pick our go-to-ice-cream dessert for a summer dinner party, Magellan and I agree it would be Strawberry Tapioca Soda, a recipe we’ve been making since it first appeared in The New York Times in 2007.

Amanda Hesser, then the paper’s food editor, was doing a series on updating old recipes. (She carried the idea through to a door-stopper cookbook that is indispensable, a modern update to The Joy of Cooking.) She asked Michael Laiskonis, the executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin, arguably one of the best restaurants in New York for the last three decades, to modernize a 1949 recipe for Strawberry Tapioca Flamingo—the result was his Strawberry Tapioca Soda.

Pastry Chef Michael Laiskonis who came up with the recipe for Strawberry Tapioca Soda (Photo: Pastry Arts Magazine)

Why do we love it? It’s refreshing, fun because you need both a big straw and a long spoon to eat it, quirky with the large tapioca pearls, easy to make (use your favourite store-bought strawberry ice cream), and bursting with flavour and texture. (I also use the citrus/basil strawberry marinade in this recipe when making strawberry shortcake and other desserts.)

Are you turning up your nose at the tapioca? Skip it if you like, but you’ll miss the fun of sucking it up in a straw and the bonus texture it gives the dessert. Michael put it there for a reason, and he’s no slouch. He was awarded Outstanding Pastry Chef by the James Beard Foundation, twice named him one of the “10 Best Pastry Chefs in America” by Pastry Art and Design and named “Culinary Professional of the Year’” by the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

Strawberry Tapioca Soda

Michael Laiskonis's recipe is perfect; I have changed very little. I like to mash about one-quarter of the strawberries with a potato masher in the marinating process to extract more strawberry juice. And while Michael calls for strawberry sorbet or ice cream, we always use ice cream. But why not strawberry gelato if that's your thing? To avoid wasting the mashed strawberries after straining their juice, I blend them with yogurt for a smoothie. And we find that you need a little more sparkling soda than the original recipe calls for. (Don't tell Justin, but we've saved some outlawed-in-Canada plastic straws especially for this dessert.)
Servings: 4

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ripe strawberries, hulled and coarsely chopped
  • 5 large basil leaves, torn
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 1 lemon, juiced and zested
  • 1 orange, juiced and zested
  • 1/4 cup large tapioca pearls
  • 6 cups water
  • 3 tbsp sugar
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 10-12 oz cold sparkling soda water
  • 12 small & pretty strawberries for garnish
  • 4 small basil leaves for garnish
  • 4 large scoops of your favourite strawberry ice cream

Instructions

  • For the strawberry juice, toss together the strawberries, torn basil leaves, juice and zest of the lemon and orange and the sugar in a large bowl. I like to mash about a quarter of the berries with a potato masher. Cover, place in a warm area and let stand for 4 hours, then chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.
  • To cook the tapioca, in a medium saucepan, bring 6 cups water to a boil. Stir in the tapioca, reduce the heat to a steady simmer and cook until there is only a pinpoint of white in the centre of each pearl. This will take about 35 minutes; watch it carefully from this point onward, as if it cooks for too long, you'll have mush. Stir occasionally to prevent the pearls from sticking to the bottom of the pan or to each other.
  • Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, heat 3 Tbsp of sugar and 1/3 cup water until the sugar has dissolved. Let cool. Drain the tapioca and rinse with cold water. Stir into the cooled syrup and chill.
  • Strain the strawberry mixture through a fine-mesh sieve, pressing on the solids to extract the maximum amount of juice. You should have about 1 1/3 cups. (I save the solids and blend them with yogurt for a smoothie.)
  • To assemble, strain the tapioca from the syrup and divide it among 4 tall glasses. Add 1/3 cup strawberry juice to each glass. Divide the cold sparkling soda among the glasses and gently stir to combine. Top with a scoop of strawberry ice cream and garnish each with 3 strawberries and the basil. Serve immediately, with a large straw and long spoon. 

We probably like Strawberry Tapioca Soda because it reminds us of the nostalgia of that age-old treat, a float. As Michael says, he’s realized that he’s really in “the nostalgia business.”

I find my work as a pastry chef, no matter how refined, is a potential portal to one’s own childhood. A sense of responsibility surfaced with this realization, but so too did a renewed sense of play and exploration; I enjoy the challenge of interweaving those nostalgic elements in ways that might not be obvious. Each dessert must have broad democratic appeal, but a true ‘dialog’ emerges when an element of a dish tickles the guest in some ineffable way. No matter how much we add our clever contemporary spin, through technique or ingredients, that nostalgia is what we’re trying to access. No matter the age of our guests, whether six years old, or sixty, the potential in tapping those memories can be powerful.

Now excuse us, because there’s a place in our ‘hood that makes a S’More Frozen Banana Ice Cream Bar that we haven’t had yet this summer. And you, what’s your favourite ice cream treat?

Navigation

Charleboix, Sylvain. “Are Canadians not screaming for ice cream?” Canadian Grocer. July 24, 2023.

Hesser, Amanda. The Essential New York Times Cook Book: Classic Recipes for a New Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. From the 150-year-old food archive of the NYT Amanda has amassed 1,400 recipes, original and updated, that will fill you up for years. It’s become a wedding-present favourite, a modern replacement for The Joy of Cooking and an all-in-one cookbook for new cooks and seasoned pros.

Ice Cream Consumption by Country 2024.” World Population Review.

“National Ice Cream Day: Ice Cream By Canadian Province.” Huffington Post. July 13, 2012.

Rosario, Nico.  “An Interview with Michael Laiskonis: ICE Creative Director, Pastry Chef, and Nostalgia Hunter.” Inquisitive Eater. October 8, 2013. “Michael Laiskonis was named Creative Director of New York City’s Institute of Culinary Education in 2012. Previously Executive Pastry Chef Le Bernardin for eight years, his pastry philosophy manifests itself in a style of desserts that balance art and science, and contemporary ideas with classic fundamentals.”

8 Responses

  1. Your blog trigger3 a couple of memories from the way back machine, the first is the old wooden ice cream maker you had on the farm Spice, can’t recall a of the flavours but just recall the gold that came out of that wooden wonder machine, beyond awesome although I think there had to be some tired arm muscles from cranking on that unit.
    Second is the memory of the ice cream that came in 2-3 gallon cardboard containers from back in the 50’s that my grandparents sold in their summer resort, food both, on the Torch River back in the day. As I recall this was stored in a cool place in the garage, again stored in some type of canvas sack or bag, probably insulated to preserve the temp, this was probably after the demise of the ice shack used for years before refrigerators came into vogue.
    Again I can not remember the flavours, probably because there were no bad flavours, that’s in my mind 😋😋😋😋😋😋.
    Nice article and perfectly timed as we sit here in + 30 temps, although the A/C keeps the heat in check.
    One final thought on your article was the water coming out of the flowing well over at the resort, this was piped into livestock watering tanks that cooled the soft drinks, that water was beyond cool and you could barley stand to stay in the excess water pool down by the river. Summer memories from the old. Days, wow.
    Great picture of your mother below. 👍👍👍👍👍
    Barry

    1. How could I have forgotten to mention my first taste of ice cream from, as you so aptly described, the “wooden wonder machine.” No wonder my favourite flavour of all time is plain old vanilla. Remember all the salt we had to add to keep the ice cold?

      I was at your grandparents’ resort a few times but cannot recall the ice cream flavours that they sold. The Matthew’s were such warm and lovely people is my main memory. And the sandy beach…

  2. Ice Cream – Ice Cream – everyone loves Ice Cream…..Your blog brings back memories of when we started Flavours Ice Cream in Winnipeg almost 40 years ago. We started – built and ran this 40 seat restaurant next to the new & only indoor waterslide in Manitoba. Unfortunately the waterslide went broke and we sold the restaurant shortly after that. The most popular ice cream for kid’s birthday parties was bubble gum – and the residuals were evident under tables. However we do still love Ice Cream and also frequent Costco for their Ice cream bars.

  3. I am fond of coconut in my ice cream, b ut one can never go wrong with fresh fruit ice creams..Also the Akis ice cream cake I made for Brian is now his favourite. Coming up this next week, I better get busy! Yummy blog..

    1. Reminds me of an old 70s recipe I still make for Italian Cassata Ice Cream Cake—a recipe from Gourmet magazine that is SO good. Maybe for next year on Ice Cream Day…

  4. Coffee ice cream is my favourite, followed my salted caramel from Rain & Shine. And I do enjoy coconut, oh and mango gelato, oh yes and…..

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