Ample Hills Creamery Co-Founders, Jackie Cuscuna & Brian Smith

Published Oct 16, 2023, 7:01 AM

Isaac Mizrahi sits down with Ample Hills Creamery co-founders and co-owners, Jackie Cuscuna and Brian Smith, to discuss his favorite topic… ice cream. They chat about how their ice cream company shot to success with fans like Oprah and Steven Spielberg, how they lost everything, what it’s like running a business together as a married couple and more.

Follow Hello Isaac on @helloisaacpodcast on Instagram and TikTok, Isaac @imisaacmizrahi on Instagram and TikTok and Jackie, Brian and Ample Hills Creamery on Instagram @amplehills.

(Recorded on September 12, 2023)

Basically, our approach has always been to go down the cookie aisle at the grocery store, the cereal aisle at the grocery store, the candy oulet, this grocery store, right to look for inspiration. Now, a lot of times we'll go and make those cookies, or we'll make that candy, or we'll take the cereal and we'll turn it into an ice cream flavor. But Ample Hills, the social all of it was all about making ice cream in the most artisanal way possible, but in service of flavors that were not fruit freuy or fancy. There were flavors aimed at kids and kids at heart, and so that means they have pieces of cookies and candies. And so when you go and do that, I think it's easier to sort of hit that home run that you're talking about.

This is Hello Isaac, my podcast about the idea of success and how failure affects it. I'm Isaac Mizrahi, and in this episode I talked to the co founders of Ample Hills Creamery, Jackie Kuskoona and Brian Smith.

Hello Isaac. It's Jackie Kuskuoner.

And Brian Smith from Ample Hills Creamery.

Can't wait to talk to you about all things ice cream.

See you soon.

When I was growing up, ice cream was sort of a treat in the house, especially weirdly Carvell like we were insane about Carvell and good humor like those were the real kind of ice cream treats for me growing up. It wasn't until I was in my early twenties when I started to buy Hoggin, Dawes and Ben and Jerry's and all those kind of incredible brands of ice cream that I discovered my real obsession with the subject of ice cream. But since then it has become an entire obsession. And I will say I've mentioned this a few times. I'm almost entirely lactose intolerant, but I don't care. I persist in eating ice cream and it might kill me one of these days. And I can't think of a better way to die than by eating ice cream. Okay, Today, my guests are these incredible people, Brian Smith and Jackie Couscoona. They founded and run a company called Ample Hills Creamery. And this is my opportunity to get as much information as I can about my favorite, literally my favorite subject in the world, ice cream. Let's get into it. Let's dig in. Brian and Jackie. Brian Smith and Jackie Couscoona. You guys are married and you have I would consider to be the greatest life and the greatest job in creation, which is that you have founded and owned this unbelievable ice cream company called Ample Hills. And I want to start by saying that you're a cute couple. You guys are cute. I mean, thank you And do you like working together? Is it okay?

Yes?

Yes, yes, no, no, come on, give it to me, Jackie.

Listen. It's really hard running a business, and you know, running a family and a life.

It's raising two children. I have two teenage kids and they've grown up in the ice cream shop, you know, and of course they wish that we had a candy store instead. But you know, it is we have a lot of fun together and we can lean on each other. But it is challenging when you know, the dinner table is filled with talk about ice cream or breakfast table and you know, lying in bed, which is you know, we try to keep it out of the bedroom, but it is not easy. And the kids just say, stop talking about ice cream.

Unbelievable. Well, are you ever at each other's throats?

Yeah?

Okay, Well that's a good honest answer, because you know, I live for my work, like that's what I do. I love my job, and I can sense that you all do as well. What's more important to you, guys, ice cream or like each other? I mean that that's a deep question. And you know what, you can raise your hand if it's and raise two hands or something. If you don't want to actually say the word.

Go ahead, Brian, that's easy. Jackie is far more important to me than I can. Come on. But I mean, the nice thing is is the real balance that we have is that we just do two completely separate things. I mean, we work in the same company and we work together, but I make ice cream and Jackie basically does everything else, all the social media, the community outreach, the stores, the personality, the vibe. So we're not really stepping on each other.

You know.

The key to a happy marriage and to a happy partnership in the business, tell me clearly defined roles.

You know. Then sometimes they you know, blur, So there's that.

That's when it gets to be ugly, right, when it gets ugly, Yeah, I mean I have to say it's it's a crazy question. And I think why Arnold, my husband and I get along so well is because we don't ask that question because it's irrelevant, you know what I mean, It does not have to be asked all the time. But I just had to be a little impish and ask, you guys answer she kind of did.

Look, our lives are so amassed. They are both you know, work and love. It's all one.

Tell me about your story as a couple. Where did you meet?

So we actually met in the Bronx teaching high school. He was a high school teacher for a very brief time. I continued to teach high school on.

That hard job that is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I taught at the high school that I went to City as High School.

To City as School, I did so many friends who went to that school because City as School is basically like you take the subway and you get credit for like a class. No, I'm not kidd that was the myth.

That was the myth.

Right, A lot of professional kids go to City as School because they don't make you go to school.

Correct, Yes, so City as School is literally using the city as a school. So that's the name.

I love you so much. I thought I loved you because you made ice cream, But now, Darling, yeah, I'm not kidding. We're like Kindred Spirits incredible.

And you also taught there for twenty years.

Yes, I taught there for twenty years.

I did this is I did.

I created internships, so that was kind of my saving grace. I mean I went to city As because I just kind of flunked out of regular traditional high school and I fell in love with with the method, the experiential learning aspect of city As and really exploring the city.

How does ice cream making come out of the background like that?

Well, I met this guy who's in an ice cream addict and I love the city, so I wanted to create, you know, cool community gathering spaces in my city that I love, and we combined the two.

Did you go to culinary schools? How did where does ice cream come into any of this?

It was just an obsession from childhood. I mean my background was writing like bad TV movies, bad Monster of the Week movies or sci fi channel, producing, directing audio books, radio plays.

Did you have your kids while you were making this ice cream legrity.

Or well a little bit, we have them a little bit.

Before, basically around the same time, and we opened the first shop in twenty ten, and one of them was like a year old so and then the other one was born a year or two later. It was like a midlife crisis. When we turned forty we opened the ice cream show. What led to this midlife crisis. I was the one really driving the desire to like do ice cream and make ice cream, because Jackie was working at city As and was basically supporting us. Because I was a free lancer. I was making some money, but I wasn't breaking through and selling the next script of Spielberg yet, or we wouldn't have had ample Hills. And so it was one of those things where I made ice cream at home all the time because I was just obsessed with ice cream, like everybody that you know loves ice cream from childhood. And over time I just started thinking like I want to do this as a business and I want to open a shop.

I mean, you know, I got to just stop you for a minute, because if you say to people that you make ice cream at home, they go, how the hell who is this? They look at you like some kind of did you have an ice cream maker?

Did you have an an bought one.

You started by making the ice cream by hand, absolutely churning with the salt, and bought.

The Ben and Jerry's cookbook, bought everybody's cookbooks. I have, like, you know, dozens of ice cream cookbooks at home and just self taught. I mean, ice cream is a beautiful thing. It's like soup. You know, you can do anything with it. You just keep throwing different stuff into it. And it's hard to make really bad ice cream. It's hard to make really great ice cream. But you know you can make you know, I mean it's not hard for me to make really great ice cream, but I mean just over time. But takes some time to get the texture right. But the flavor is an easier thing, and just throw the flavors that you like into it. It was a gradual process of like can Jackie and I like go and buy Brian a job by taking our life savings that I was dwindling away while she was teaching and I was using up trying to write the next great American screenplay and go open up a neighborhood ice cream shop. That was the low hanging fruit. That was the goal at the wow.

I love how that is the craziest thing to say that the low hanging fruit was opening an ice cream.

I was like, we're going to use up this money five years from now, this money will have dwindled away, or we can take it and invest in something stock. For us, it was, let's go invest in a neighborhood screamshop.

I guess that sounds crazy, and that took place in Brooklyn. Yes, right, okay, you know I have been making ice cream also for a very long time in my life. And actually, if you go on Epicurious and you look up mint chocolate your ice cream, it's me doing a demonstration of mint chocolates your ice cream. I mean, there are many things about ice cream that you guys have to learn, like emulsifiers and stabilizers and stuff like that, because it's going to freeze for a long time. Right, But otherwise, if you freeze custard, you know, in a churn kind of a situation, you've got it. Am I wrong or something? Is there something I'm missing? Because you said good ice cream?

Yeah, no, it is a relatively simple thing to you know, combine those ingredients and make them, I mean to make it commercially. It comes with a whole set of other challenges. The machinery is different. All those things you have to decide, are you're going to make all the mixings, all the pieces of stuff to go into it? Are you going to buy them? You know, what is the kind of ice cream you make? How are you going to differentiate your ice cream from the seventeen thousand other brands of ice.

By the way that you just call it mixings? Yeah, mixeduff because there is no other word for these things. And ice cream.

Swirls of stuff are called varyags, vary agate.

I will be using that. Yes, Yes, let's talk about ice cream for a second, because there are different kinds of ice cream. There's gelato, there's frozen custard, there's ice cream. Can you just tell us the difference? Yeah?

So you know, frozen custard is an egg based kind of ice cream, right, So the word custard actually defines using egg yolks in your ice cream as an a mulsifier, a thickener. And that's how we actually always made ice cream for the first ten years of our existence at Amble Hills, it was a custard based.

That's always how I make ice cream, always makes.

Now never I never do it that long. I'm so excited to so turing the pandemic. After we lost the company the first time around, and we were stuck at home and I was making ice cream every day, just trying to like figure out how could I improve upon what we had done before, and I just started to play around with the idea of trying to take the eggs out of it. One just the simplicity of not having to cook that ice cream base. You know, that's quite a complicated thing.

If it breaks and it goes, yes, and then the other thing is just that eggs.

Well, they give it a richness and a custardy flavor. They are giving it a flace, which is the face the eggs. And so if you want the purity, what I found is that if you want the purity of vanilla, the purity of chocolate, the chirp purity of peanut, butter, strawberry, whatever the flavor of the ice cream is, if you remove the eggs, you're actually making a more pure flavor of ice cream because you don't have the custard or the egg adding to it.

I love you like I love you. I swear to God, I love you.

So it's great.

So now ample Hills. Right, where do those words come from?

Well, Walt Whitman wrote a poem called Leaves of Grass, Yes, women, Brooklyn's pre eminent pont crossing Brooklyn Ferry eighteen fifty six, I too lived Brooklyn of Ample Hills was mine Ample And so that poem is all about connections across space and time between people. Whitman is taking the ferry from Brooklyn into Manhattan, and he's looking at the seagulls and the skyline and the clouds, and he's saying to the reader fifty years later, one hundred years later, one hundred and fifty years later, I see you the same way you see me. You and I are the same. We see the same Ample Hills of Brooklyn, we see the same seagulls, the same city, the same water. And so it's really about the thing that binds us and for me, in a small way, that's what ice cream does, right, ice.

Cream ice cream sometimes is binding. Yes, exactly. Tell us the story of Ample Hills. Tell us like from whence it began and what happened? Because I know there's like a big story about that.

There's a big story. We started with a cart at celebrate Brooklyn. Yes, because we were like, all right, let's just see how this works if Brian enjoys making ice cream because he is the ice cream maker on the ice cream Taster.

And you used like your home freezer to like keep the stuff cold.

Right, Yeah, we rented a small commercial kitchen that we were making ice cream and then selling it from the cart, and people loved it and it was really successful, which was when we decided we're going to open a brick and mortar shop.

Where did you park the cart?

Where was the park was? I mean the cart was in Prospect Park. Oh, yes, So that's when we decided to open this shop on the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and Saint Mark's in Prospect Heights.

Why did you decide that you should open it there?

Well, we had friends that lived a couple of doors down and there was this corner space it was for rent and they kept hoping that we would open an ice cream shop there. And actually it was interesting was that the space was owned by the guy who lives there, who's the landlord, and he had the opportunity to rent the space out to a Chase Bank half of it for you know, I think it was like twice as much.

As what we paid it. Yeah, to have an ATM machine basically, you know. But he wanted a neighborhood ice cream shop, and from two untested people that were going to rent the space from him, but the credit, you know, he rented the space to us. And that's incredible.

So you opened the shoph you gave it all you had. Did you paint it yourself? Did you decorate it? Did you get the stuff yourself?

Yeah?

I mean it was all our you know, blood, sweat and tears, just you know, creating that shop. And we really had no idea, no idea how it was going to do.

Twenty ten. This was this was.

We actually opened in twenty eleven, had started in twenty ten, and.

I had made all this ice cream. But I was the only one who made the ice cream. You know. We just thought it was a little neighborhood ice cream shop. We're going to sell a few scoops and I'll be good. And so I made a bunch of ice cream. We opened the doors, and all of a sudden there were lines. We opened on a Wednesday before Memorial Day, and there was a piece in the New York Times that day Florence Fabricant wrote a little tiny piece about us. So that created a problem because it meant that lots of people that came. And by Friday, two days later, I could see that we were selling ice cream faster than I could make ice cream. And that was a problem because we were heading into the Memorial Day weekend. And so by Saturday, three days after we'd open, we started to run out of flavors of ice cream. And the dipping cabinet, Oh, is that what you call it?

A dipping care, Yes.

The dipping cabinet, that's where you dipped the ice cream, and so on Sunday we ended up running out of all the ice cream and we had to close the doors on Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, we were closed all the worl day.

How many gallons did it?

Was? One hundred and forty tubs signs, three gallons, three hundred and fifty gallons a lot. Yeah, it was a lot of ice cream, but it wasn't enough, and so I had to go hire a bunch of people teach them how to make ice cream. We were closed for nine days. We'd spent six months trying to open the store, and then we were closed with a sort of panic of any is anybody going to give us a second chance? Is anybody going to come back? And then while we were closed, the reporter.

From Times came in and wrote a beautiful article.

Outside of Florence fabricaty.

This was outside saying ice cream. Yeah, a lot of attension. And you know she lived in the neighborhood and had waited on the lines and she said, you know, ice cream shop so successful, sold out of ice cream and had to close their doors.

Well, ice cream shop so mismanaged. That's just how it felt. Ely, But that article sort of made our reputation.

But I mean, wait a minute now, because it's a business plan. You have, like so many hundreds of gallons of ice cre you go, well, if we sell all that in a month, will break even. Meantime, you sold it in a few days. So even though you may have seen it as a failure, in fact you'd made all that money or something right or yeah, okay, well that's a goodness. There was a little silver lining.

But to the whole at the time, there was no business. At the time, there was no business plan.

Right, So then you a few days later you opened your doors and it started going well again because of this New York Times article and people standing around.

Now, yeah, it's very anxiety producing when you're the person serving the line because.

You know, especially to New Yorkers, because they're are so impossible, including me impossible. Aren't you just the meanest, meanest bitch in the world and you get on so bad, We're so bad. We really don't.

I don't see people behind the counter with a sense of urgency. I'm done me too, I'm out out.

Even if you don't have urgency, just pretend you have urgency exactly. So what I want to know is like, do you sell it anywhere else but your own retail spaces or is it still one shop?

Now we are going to be selling it online, direct to consumer, and we have.

Right now there's about four or five shops. I mean, we had grown the business to about fifteen shops, and then we lost it in a bankruptcy right before the pandemic, and so we lost ample Hills, We completely lost everything, filed personal bankruptcy, you know, complete absolute failure, and then opened up another ice cream shop, totally different ice cream shop. After the pandemic sort of had started to recede called the social around the idea of the ice cream social, and then basically somebody else ran Ample Hills and we'd walked by the Ample Hills shop on our way to work every day and it was just eating a at us and we were in competition with ourselves and wow. Yeah, and then in December of last year they went out of business because they didn't want us around and they had basically thought they had bought a commodity instead of buying a brand, and we were the sort of heart and soul of the brand. And they went under. And then us, along with our investors in the social, we're able to buy it back. And so we've come back and now we have Ample Hills again.

And so what happened to the social?

The social still exists. Okay, we still are making ice cream.

I feel like it's like a Gilmore Girls thing, like I want the ice cream stir called the.

Social just yes, and we have both now.

So wait, A lot of what we talked about on this podcast is the idea of success and how failure affects it. Right, would you say that that was this failure that you learned from and came back from.

Oh yeah, we failed, you know, greatly, deeply, hardly. I hope we've learned. We have learned a lot from it.

You know.

We had to shut down and file bankruptcy for Amplehill's the same day that the whole city, New York City shut down and closed, you know, because of the pandemic.

Wow. So that's like March eighteenth exactly exactly.

And we, you know, and the failure was not I mean, it would be nice to blame the pandemic, but the failure was all ours. And really by ours, I mean mine. We were on a growth plan that was sort of stratospheric. We had Spielberg as a fan, and Oprah as a fan, and Bob I here at Disney, and we had relationships with Bob, and we made Mickey Mouse ice cream and Marvel ice cream and Star Wars ice cream, and we had built out a giant factory in Red Hook in Brooklyn along the waterfront with a whole museum like thing, the whole thing about getting too far out ahead of your skis or growing too fast, or flying too close to the sun, all of those cliches. We basically did that and imploded. We ran out of money because we were just burning through it. The problem wasn't the fact that people didn't like the ice cream. They didn't stop coming to the stories. The problem was we attempted to sort of grow too big, too fast and ran out of all the money. And so the lessons that we've learned from that, which you know, were really painful because you know, we've lost this thing that we've given birth to. And then as part of all the personal guarantees that we had put into the business, had to file personal vacercy gods. So it's about failure, right, We're talking about failure. So we've come back from the other side and you know, realize now that the growth has to be gradual. We need to be successful step by step before we grow. And that sort of venture capitalist idea of just grow and figure out profitability later that was our problem. So now we're back in a much smaller, more focused Well.

By the way, it was so your fault, all your Brian had nothing to do. Excuse me exactly, you're going to let him take the fall for that. Come on, But maybe that's why it works because you go like, yeah, it was my fault. No, was it really all his fault?

It wasn't all his faults. It was definitely not all his flee.

That's not what you say late night in bead. No. I mean I was the CEO, and so I was the one that was sort of making the big financial decisions, and I mean Jackie went along with the decisions if she'd just sort of foot down and said, hell, no, we're not we're not making big facts ice cream.

And I want to say, like the other sentence I heard and there was that you had a chance to go back and figure out other ways to make ice cream, you know, without eggs, and you know, because that's a big part of it too, right, you might not have done that. How'd you been?

Oh? Absolutely? And in fact, when we were at our height with ample hills the first time around, before we filed for bankruptcy, I was no longer making ice when I was the CEO and we had a big factory and we were making ice cream on big giant machines called continuous freezers that I didn't know how to operate. And so I had pulled myself away, you know, and the way that you need to as you grow a company and you become the seeds. You're not the one doing it with your hands in it. But the problem was is that I'd lost touch with the very thing that I did so well and that I'm now swearing to not do again, you know. And it doesn't mean I have to make every scoop of ice cream that we ever make now, but it means that I need to be in the kitchen a good part of the time with.

Enjoying the process at least absolutely right. I want to talk a minute about food production in general, because it's something that literally I like stay up at night thinking the chickens and the eggs and the things, you know, and I also think about for instance, I have these friends who have a creamery that have like a dairy farm which they bought and they developed in Connecticut, right, and then from that they began making the ice cream because the cream they thought was extremely special that these cows they were fed as certain feed. Blah blah blah blah. Do you have like a special kind of a cream with somebody, like a deal with somebody where you get the exclusive cream of certain cows. I'm not kidding. I would like to know that it's difficult.

It is. Yeah, we don't have an exclusive, but we do work with a very small group and the Hudson Valley called Hudson Valley Fresh. There's a cooperative of seven or eight farms. The biggest challenge with heavy cream is that it's extremely expensive for the dairy to produce because when you produce the heavy cream, you end up with all of the skim milk as a byproduct of making the heavy cream. And so it's very hard as you grow and you get bigger as an ice cream company to go to the small farm to get your heavy cream because they just can't produce enough of it because the financial model doesn't work for the dairy, right. Know. My fantasy was always we'd have our own cows, you know, and we'd have our own cream. But it's not a realistic one.

No, no, no, I got to tell you, Like, the ice cream that I make is like a third cream and the rest is milk. And you're saying that you because you make just ice cream, so.

You you know it's a fifty no, no, no, fifty to fifty. You can't actually technically make ice cream with only heavy cream water. What do you think happens? If you churn your ice cream?

It gets too hard to get what becomes better?

There you go if you churn heavy cream that makes better, so you have to cut it with milk.

Got it?

Okay?

Got it? All right? So how many flavors have you mastered or how many flavors do you make? Can you even count?

I lost now? I mean it's a few hundred over the.

But there are certain ones that are always there. Yes, Which ones are those? Well?

Vanilla chocolate, right, Well, there's vanilla chocolate strawberry because people you know needs have it. Yeah, yeah, think of that.

But you know o guey butter cake, banana pudding, salt came Yeah.

Are the ones. And then are there seasonal ones that come up?

Yeah, like work pumpkins and pumpkins, yeah, apple cider sorbet we've done before for the fall.

Is there like a lab somewhere?

Yeah, in Industry City is where we make all the ice cream, and that's basically also the lab. And so today, before we came here, we were just playing around with a brown sugar cinnamon ice cream that has oatmeal cookies in it. So yeah, we were always experimenting and playing there. That part's a lot of fun.

And also after all this, you still make ice cream at home.

I don't make much ice cream at home, I make dinner. I'm usually the one making dinner. Yeah, I make all the creek.

Yeah. Yeah. Back to ice cream for a minute, Is there something like that you go, Yeah, if you do that, and you do that, and you do that, you're going to have a hit on your hands. Is this some kind of like ice surefire way to make a hit ice cream?

I think so. I mean, basically, our approach has always been to go down the whether it's the cookie aisle at the grocery store, the cereal aisle at the grocery store, or the candy isle at this grocery store, right to look for inspiration. Now, a lot of times we'll go and make those cookies, or we'll make that candy, or we'll take the cereal and we'll turn it into an ice cream flavor. But ample Hills, the social all of it was all about making ice cream in the most artisanal way possible, but in service of flavors that were not artisanal quote unquote, that were not fruit, fruy or fancy. They weren't goat cheese and miso ice cream. There were flavors aimed at kids and kids at heart, and so that means they have pieces of cookies and candies.

And that's an important distinction because you know, like you go to Laberna Den and they have Jazzman saffron ice cream and it's delicious.

Yeah, it was really delicious place.

But it's not the ice cream that you want to sit there and eat by the now spoonful.

And I grew up like Ben and Jerry's was like the thing that was my first inspiration. At one point we got to meet Jerry and that was like the greatest thing in the world because that's the kind of ice cream I sort of set out to make. And so when you go and do that, you're speaking to that kind of kid inside of people, and it's I think it's easier to sort of hit that home run that you're talking about.

Yes, yes, So now talk to me for a minute about this, because you went there, you like saw the behemoth. You were going to be the next Ben and Jerry or something, right, and then that didn't work and you came back from that and now you are a certain kind of sustainable good size.

Would you say, yeah, I mean we went from fifteen shops to nothing and then we started again with the social and having bought back, we now have a total of five shops, which is great, and now it's really about making sure that those shops, each individual shop is successful.

And so you have no plans to sort of like you know, call food emporium and sell your ice cream to food. But you're going to do the online thing soon. You're gearing up for that, is that right? Yeah?

I mean eventually maybe, but in the near term no. I mean the Whole Foods Whole saling pints of ice cream is a really difficult business. The margins are just so difficult, and it's so hard. When somebody walks into one of our shops, we've already sold them a scoop of ice cream, right, I mean, there's the whole community and the vibe and the character of the store itself is selling that ice cream. If you put that pint of ice cream on the grocery store aisle at Whole Foods next to twenty other pints, it's a much bigger lift. And it's not something that we take lightly, and we definitely would like to do it, but it's just I think the brand has to have more name recognition and build before you try to start.

That's true, that's true, and also a good deal of sort of art direction or something and like marketing direction, but even more than ever social media. How important is social media or media?

Right?

Like how because you said it was Florence Fabricant and then another famous writer who wrote about you in the Times. I mean, is it media or social media? Do you think that will sort of.

Yeah, I mean I think it's both. But I really do think it has to feel authentic and real. And people are, you know, inundated with social media, you know bs a lot of the times, you know, the images and just the pomp and circumstance of it all until they actually experience it. And again, I'm very much about experiences. It's like the essence of what it is that we're doing, which is gathering people together, which is community.

Which is unbelievable. This is a great story. I can't believe this. Like, and so what happens. You're in Brooklyn, obviously, but do you go to like Forest Hills or something going yours Hills? No, I grew up in Q Gardens.

Yeah, so you know, we do actually have a shop in Astoria, and we have a shop on the Upper West Side.

So you you go in and you try to understand communities, and that coupled with the size of the facility and what you need from machinery because you make all of the ice cream locally to the shop.

Now, okay, it's made an industry city and Brooklyn. Yeah, and so then we send it around city. Yeah, a bunch of different makers and bakers and food places and a lot of different businesses.

Is there one ice cream outside of your own that is a commercial brand that you guys.

Like, what would you say? Tread carefully?

I know, I know, honestly, I know this is going to sound you know whatever, But like, I really don't enjoy anyone else's ice cream except for ours. I feel like it hits all the right notes. I know that, I mean the right thing to know.

I mean it.

Brian will have a whole bunch of different ice cream pints in the freezer. I will not touch any of them except for the Social or ample Hills.

Yeah, I mean, I always have a pint of Ben and Jerry's in my freezer. Jenny's, I mean, all the different ones.

What's the weirdest flavor you've ever made?

Oh?

Should we tell them about that? The beer monkeys?

Yeah, go for it.

I get those.

No, no, you don't. That would be the only flavor did not work.

Okay, yeah, you know how beer and apples go together, because you know, you'll do like a fondue with cheese and apple and beer and that really works. That does. So I thought, hmm, what if that was an ice.

Well about the cheese part, but apples and beer.

So I had apple lambic beer ice cream. And then I took cheese nips and cheese crackers and pot cheetos and we caramelized them with like some sugar and then toasted them. And we made that and put it out and called it the beer Munchies. And there was one person that was really upset that we stopped making it.

That's hilarious. I'll tell you what. I once made a delicious thing. This is the simplest thing in the world. You've probably done it, which is, you know the way Italians eat strawberries with vinegar. That's aboutsamic vinegar strawberry ice cream. And it was delicious. Anyway, that's one thought. Because I don't really make strange flavors. That's about the most I've ever gone into strange flavors. And by the way, I will tell you that I went through this very existential experience of trying to figure out how to keep chocolate from getting very very hard after a day or two of freezing. And I figured it out. But the best solution to that is just eat it all. Well, you know, I'm serious, It's like that is the answer, because it tastes the best, you know, and it's already not hard and going to break your teeth. But I figured it out. You know that person Lynn rosetto Casper, she's a famous chef, and I asked her, and I think it was her that wrote me back that you have to add a little bit of you know, fat of some sort like and I use Actually what I use was coconut oil, and I could or coconut you know, contained in that stuff, and you could taste the coconut and suddenly it was like chocolate and coconut and.

I didn't like YEA, So you can get a refined coconut oil which has no flavor of the coconut in it. That's what you need to.

GeTe watch it, lady. And so because he's the man of my drink.

When you you know magic shell that used to get when you were a kid and you pour the chocolate on it and what it means. So that is a coconut oil based thing, but there's no flavor of the coconut in that chocolate. And so you can make your own magic shell, which is the same thing as the chocolate chips that you're talking about in the ice cream, because what they do is it they freeze up in their heart in the ice cream, but when they enter your mouth they melt quickly. They have a lower a quicker melting point.

Do you do all that chocolate? You buy the raw chocolate, and you do.

We do like what you'd call traditionally a stratchi of tella, which is like, you know, an Italian like chocolate chip ice cream, where basically, as the machine is churning and the ice cream is moving around, you're pouring the liquid chocolate into the machine and with the bit of the coconut oil.

It becomes crackly sort of breaks of darling.

And you end up with shards or chips.

Are trying to induce me, You are trying hard to like get really good pants at this point. Okay, seriously, all right, as a couple, how do you stay focused in the ice cream?

Like?

Is there ever something like another company, a competitor who's doing something or something you see on social because I get distracted all the time from my business or from my actual livelihood, you know, by seeing stuff that's going on. Is there like a life hack that you can offer me here?

I do too, and I think, really it ends up just for me thinking about the why, like why am I doing this? Why are we in this business together? What is it that you know really speaks to my soul about what we're doing? And it comes back to just you know, creating these spaces in the city that I love dearly, that you know, I want for other people to experience, I mean, and that it just brings me joy and focus.

But that is a good answer I have to say, because I keep forgetting that that's part of this. It's like community and ice cream, you know.

But yeah, and from my point of view, where in terms of just making ice cream, I stay off of social media looking at what other ice cream people are doing, because you know, I go into the grocery store and I go to other ice cream shops and I buy ice cream and I eat it. Just to make sure that I'm staying on top of what other people are doing. But it can become crippling and overwhelming if you're if you become so lost in what other people are doing, because then you're chasing them, and you're chasing another story, and you're you're chasing social media, trying to make the next cronut or something, as opposed to staying true to the ideas that have got us here over the last day.

It's a balance. And by the way, I can't tolerate ice cream, but I eat it anyway, Like I'm not kidding. This is how desperate I am ice cream. Okay, okay, should we try this? Because I really I can't wait another second. I don't care if it's at hard?

What what?

What is that?

That's butter pecan, that's but pecan crumble. So it's basically, we make a butter pecan ice cream and then we take the pecans and we crumble them up with flour, butter and sugar and put them in there.

It's like pie.

Yes, that's the idea, and.

Hey, listen, is there butter and butter pecan?

Yes? In order to get that flavor, which is challenging because butter when it gets cold, it like you know, seizes up. So you have to add the liquid butter while blending it in like it stays together. But you get every sugar butter because that's all right. I don't know how you feel about peppermint, but this is my favorites. You know, when I go to the movies, Junior mints is what I always like to get in the movie. So we make our own peppermint patties and then we have those chocolate chips. Those are the stratchy of tela. Basically in a peppermint ice cream. It's really rich and uh, it's maybe a good palate cleanser after the butter pecan.

By the way, it's not green.

No, I was going to ask you how you felt about it, I say something.

Yeah.

One thing I did discover is that when you're making meant ice cream, if you add a little green food coloring, it just makes it taste even mint.

Okay, so.

You're looking at green and you taste men. I mean it really.

There's there's two camps on that. Yeah, a lot of debates. So this one here is called oh Captain, my captain, speaking of speaking of Whitman, but it's also Captain crunch ice cream with So we we puree the captain crunch into the ice cream itself, so the captain crunch flavors the ice cream. And then there's pieces of fruity pebbles that are enrobed in white chocolate. That is the mix in, you know, but the ice cream, uh oh, come on, it's like blended in. This really tastes like ice right, it's it's so much fun.

I was expecting to not like this. It's not like, this is amazing.

It's so good.

The fruity pebbles. Who knew fruity.

Pebbles, right, right, it's very strange. And then this one is so Banana is a really hard flavor of ice cream to make because it's all the water and the ice cream. So what we do is we take the banana ice cream, but we add vanilla wafers to the base so they soak, they get old mushy, and then you actually blend them in, so that ice cream is actually vanilla wafers and bananas and milk and cream blended together with pieces of vanilla wafers, and you.

Know, it's nice about it. And then it doesn't taste like banana extract or something.

No, real bananas, bananas.

It's really banana.

Yeah, and the key for us was finding that we could add the vanilla wafers because it allowed the texture to be creamy and have a body, because well, vanilla wafers, you know, forget.

It in the shops. I'll walk past that, and I can't walk past that. You know, certain flavors you can walk by.

And just can't.

Certain flavors you cannot walk by without.

I'm like, okay now, because banana pudding, yes.

It's very it's so comforting.

So this next flavor is called the Munchies. So we take pretzels and again we pure the pretzels into the ice cream so that ice cream takes on the sort of multi salty pretzel flavor. And then we take potato chips, pretzels and ritz crackers, crumble them together and toss them with butter and sugar and toast them. And then we add bits of M and m's for color. So it's a real munchy's kind of you.

Know, it's a monkey's experience.

Yeah, darling. Do people copy you? Do people take your ideas? Oh?

Yeah, we have seen that to some extent. Yeah, And a lot of the collaborations that we did, like we did Star Wars ice cream the Light Side and the Dark Side, And we did Mickey Mouse flavors of ice cream and Black Panther ice cream and Captain America ice cream. And we're starting to see a lot of brands are doing these kind of things now where you're telling stories with ice cream flavors, which is you know, is great and fun. All right. One last flavor, which is Cooky Olay, which is basically a straight up coffee ice cream with oreo pieces more of the straight up the middle. Okay, comforting coffee.

Oh, this is so good. This is coffee, like you just said, coffee oreos oreos. Yeah, wow, so you steep the beans.

No, Actually, coffee ice cream is really difficult to do with traditional coffee because coffee is ninety nine percent of water exactly.

But that's why if you steep it with milk or you make it, you.

Could do that. That's would be very labor intensive and also you'd need a lot of heat to pull that flavor, so you use, strangely a combination of things. One is like a coffee syrup, which is basically somebody's making coffee and then pulling ninety five percent of the water out of it, and so you end up with something you wouldn't drink because it's like a yes, it's exactly And then and then instant coffee, which is you wouldn't probably drink on a Sunday morning, but when you put it with the milk in the cream, the instant coffee is like the way to go to make a good flavor of coffee ice cream.

And now I'm just lying to myself. I'm trying to count my Now.

Forget the points, forget the points.

Today.

Yeah, I made coffee aescam ons and it was delicious, But I didn't do any of that I forgot. I followed a recipe. It was about making something with the beans, like I think I had to steep the beans.

And that can work on a small scale at home. It's very difficult to do that at a larger industrial scale. You know.

You know what, I'm going back for a little bit more of yes, which I didn't expects, but if you can, because that is like also, I didn't get enough of that.

Sorry.

And you know what's really scary about ice cream is that as you eat it and it melts, it gets even more delicious. And then by the time you know that you're finished with every goal.

That's true.

Okay, Well, please take this away, I mean, please get this out of my sight.

I'm glad you like.

Top three for me.

Top three definitely peppermint, banana and butter pegan. That's my thing. Thank you?

All right?

So I have a final question for the two of you. When your a bit appears in the New York Times, what is it going to say about you? First? Let's start with you, Jackie Well.

I would say die hard New Yorker, dedicated to creating community gathering spaces that were welcoming and sweet.

Wow Well and soulmate of Isaac Musrahi by the way, yeah yes, and that that we didn't even know until today. And what about you, Brian.

I mean, I'd like to be remembered for making ice cream that is a time machine that takes you back to being five or six and having it for the first time, you know, with your mom or your dad, or your sister or your brother or some party. I love the way that really incredible food, whether it's ice cream or something else, can just transport you. And ice cream is so uniquely American and has such a unique place in American popular culture and our lives to be able to have made something that touched people and brought them back to a simpler, happier time. That's what I thought.

Okay, I'm gonna ask another question, what is the etymology of ice cream? Do you know the story?

Yeah? I mean it's very long and convoluted, and I'm not sure that it's definitive. I mean, one of our earliest ice cream makers was Thomas Jefferson, you know, and you can find his recipe online that they would make. But it would have been something where you've taken one bowl and nested it in another bowl with ice and salt and stirred it around. And that started to popularize it, Dolly Madison.

But I mean because my guess is that it started in France. Yeah, only because it's cream. And you know what, I read a lot about those early chefs, know Escoffier and Carem and all of those guys, and you know, they had to make Louis the fourteenth like frozen things, and they had to get up at a certain time every fourth day, and you know, Paul the ice in and do all this stuff. You know. So I just always think that everything comes.

Out, and that's very possible. But in terms of popularizing it to like the masses, where it became something that the pedestrians, you know, like, you know, that's that was an American thing, you know, and where it came down from on high and was there. And part of it is a woman named Nancy Johnson in eighteen forty three invented the hand cranked ice cream maker, the actual closed cylinder dasher blade hand crank that came about it from this American woman in the eighteen forties.

Well, thank you, guys. Do you want to promote anything on this podcast.

Bit, Well, we're shipping nationwide.

Oh yes, this is a big thing. So this is a big thing. Is there a website you can go to get it shipped?

Ample Hills dot com a M P L E h I L l s dot com. Starting sometime in October, we hope we'll be able to ship ice cream around the country.

This is major and dangerous. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Of course, now that I've finished this interview with Jackie and Brian, I think of a million different questions I want to ask them about the subject, But I really do feel extremely satisfied after that incredible talk. I also feel incredibly satisfied having eaten those absolutely amazing, amazing ice creams. And I will tell you, as a person who studies this as a subject who goes out and eats ice cream, and who eats commercial ice cream and fancy ice cream at Laberna Dan and like all kinds of ice cream, this was extremely extremely special and so so I urge you not only to tell your friends about this podcast and listen to it, but also to go out and get the damn ice cream and eat it because it's amazing. And if I were Oprah Winfrey and this was one of my favorite things, baby, you'd be going out to buy this ice cream. So pretend I'm Oprah okay for like one second, and go out and get it. You get a Pine Device cream, and you get a buye Device cream. You get some ice cream, and darlings, be sure to check out my social media where Jackie Bryan and I make this divine new flavor of ice cream that I came up with. It's an espresso chocolate with chocolate covered pretzels, some chocolate covered nuts, and whiskey. We had so much fun in the kitchen and the flavor is absolutely beyond, beyond, beyond beyond. Just follow me on Instagram and I am Isaac Musrachi to check it out. Darlings. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and tell some and tell a friend, tell your mother, tell your cousin, tell everyone you know. Okay, and be sure to rate the show. I love rating stuff. Go on and rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts so more people can hear about it. It makes such a gigantic difference and like it takes a second, so go on and do it. And if you want more fun content videos and posts of all kinds, follow the show on Instagram and TikTok at Hello Isaac podcast And by the way, check me out on Instagram and TikTok at. I am Isaac Msrahi. This is Isaac Missrahi. Thank you, I love you and I never thought I'd say this, but goodbye Isaac. Hello Isaac is produced by Imagine Audio Awfully Nice and I AM Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by Me Isaac Mssrahi. Hello Isaac is produced by Robin Gelfenbein. The Senior producers are Jesse Burton and John Assanti and his executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazerkarral Welker, and Nathan Chlokey at Imagined Audio Production management from Katie Hodgens, sound design and mixing by Cedric Wilson. Original music composed by Ben Wilson. A special thanks to Neil Phelps and Sarah katanak at i AM Entertainment

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Hello Isaac with Isaac Mizrahi

Isaac Mizrahi is an expert -  at almost everything! He’s an iconic fashion designer, actor, singer,  
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