Kitchen Notes 01/14/10

As most (but not all) of our customers already know, all our ice cream is made on site in the kitchen behind our serving area.  If you look, you can see a bit of the kitchen through the porthole.   We each take a lot of pride in the ice cream, and all strive to make it as good as it can possibly be.  We use real food ingredients in all our ice creams and sorbets.  Not only do we strictly avoid artificial flavorings, of the over 500 flavors we make, only two use any flavorings at all:  Root Beer and Licorice.  In general, we won't make an ice cream unless we can get the flavor from real food, which has prevented us from making "Blue Bubble Gum" or "Rainbow Sprinkle",  a sacrifice we are willing to live with.

Our base of our ice cream is a custard, which in ice-cream speak means egg yolks are an ingredient as well as milk and cream...

The custard base helps provide that smooth rich flavor that defines Mallard.  This custard base is made to our specification at Lochmead Dairy, a fourth generation family dairy.  Lochmead milks 600 cattle, and breeds their own stock...no outside cattle have been introduced to their farm in more than 25 years.  Lochmead is a "single origin" dairy, meaning they are able to process and pasteurize on site, using only their own milk -- many dairies truck their milk to a centralized processing facility where it may or may not be mixed with milk from other farms.

When I spoke with Lochmead this morning getting some facts for the blog, they also told me they are installing a methane digester on the farm and it will be produce enough electricity for 200 homes in their community in just another month or two.  Pretty cool huh?

This may seem obvious, but the Lochmead cows are not fed the rBST hormone.  This hormone forces dairy cattle to produce freakishly more milk than they can safely or naturally do...many cattle treated with rBST succumb due to brittle bones (the calcium in their bones is stripped away due to the excessive milk production).  The hormone is banned in many countries but is approved by the USDA...ironically, farmers who were NOT using rBST have had to fight for the right to say that their cows were not treated!

I guess i just inadvertently "marketed" Mallard Ice Cream as rBST free, so here is the required disclaimer:  The FDA has stated that no significant difference exists between milk derived from cows treated with artificial hormones and milk derived from cows not treated with artificial hormones.

For more info on rBST, click here http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-rbst-free-mean.htm

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!
-Dev