Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Last month at Moto, pastry chef Ben Roche called me over and said, “Hey, you wanna see me make ice cream in 30 seconds?” He’d poured some soy milk into a stand mixer, along with some parsnip juice, and now he hit the switch. As he hoisted a metal canister of liquid nitrogen and tipped it into the spinning bowl, a swirling white fog rose up from the center and spilled out over the edge. While I waited for the mummified hand to emerge, he explained that the LN2 helps the ice cream set up superfast, minimizing the size of the ice crystals that get into the mix, resulting in a smooth, dense product with intense flavor. With that he turned off the mixer and voila: vegan “carrot cake” ice cream. And he was right. It felt like cold silk on the tongue, and the subtle natural sweetness of root vegetable slowly emerged and lingered and lingered–“Yeahhhh,” I thought, “that is just like carrot cake. But with parsnips.”
It’s certainly a good show. iCream has its mixers behind glass and you can gasp to your heart’s content when the fog blooms from the bowl. But texturally I thought it far less creamy and smooth than a typical old-fashioned gelato, and the pear flavor was very much in the background, despite the fact that it wasn’t overwhelmingly sweet. As I said, there are all sorts of possible combinations, along with milk shakes and steamed pudding, so I’m willing to keep experimenting.
