Vanilla Ice Cream’s Infinite Possibilities
If you are reading this ice cream blog, odds are that Chef Michael Laiskonis has the dream job you never knew existed. Chef Laiskonis divides his time between running the Chocolate Lab and experimenting with ice cream formulation at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), where he has been the Creative Director since 2012. He occasionally teaches courses there, which is how we met last June. Chef Laiskonis was kind enough to agree to the following interview, which took place in the Chocolate Lab this past September.
A self-described “pastry-chef-by-accident”, Chef Laiskonis is originally from Detroit, where during a break from pursuing a fine arts degree he took a job at his roommate’s brother’s bakery in the suburbs and “what started as something I could do quickly became something I was compelled to do”.
He ascended the culinary ladder quickly. Newfound passion and a baseline culinary skillset got him hired at a small fine dining restaurant in Detroit where he built the pastry program from scratch, then several years later he was hired as Pastry Chef at Detroit’s Tribute, where he earned repeated national recognition. Chef Laiskonis then “somehow found himself” as the Executive Pastry Chef at New York’s Le Bernardin, where he stayed for eight years, during which time he was awarded the James Beard Foundation award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2007.
Chef Laiskonis’ humility belies the methodical approach he applies in his work, and the curiosity and passion that drive it. Yet to hear Laiskonis tell it, he’s continued to stumble into amazing new projects and roles, including being offered the opportunity to run the Chocolate Lab at ICE, where he now works 40 hours a week (“technically part time”) in addition to all the other things he does.
Saturday session. #ICEChocolateLab pic.twitter.com/8rUoosYa2v
— Michael Laiskonis (@mlaiskonis) January 28, 2017
As for all those other things? Laiskonis came to ICE to test ideas he had been stockpiling in notebooks for years. In his words, “I wanted to create a situation where I could slow down, think one thought to its complete end.” He also guest lectures, studies chocolate history, helps with pastry curriculum development, works on marketing projects for ICE, occasionally shares his thoughts at Lucky Peach, and oh by the way he is also an ice cream wizard. Maybe thinking ‘just a few’ thoughts to their complete ends would be more accurate. But two stand out above the others:
“Ice cream and chocolate compete for my nerd sensibilities… and who knows how many iterations of chocolate ice cream I’ve done even within the last year or two to find just the right balance of flavor and texture”
The following interview is heavily edited from its original form. Many thanks to Chef Laiskonis for his generous time and commitment to sharing the knowledge he continues to create.
CM: Where did your relationship with ice cream start, and how has it changed over time?
ML: If we go back to when I was about 15 years old, my very first job was actually scooping ice cream. I never would have believed I would have gotten into the science of what I was working with at the time.
Ice cream graffiti - Clawson, Michigan. pic.twitter.com/4DT2Npy22X
— Michael Laiskonis (@mlaiskonis) October 25, 2016
As a pastry chef coming up in the mid-to-late 90s, there were a lot of very interesting things happening in pastry, both aesthetically and technologically. Already by that time desserts started to become complex, multi-component plates with lots of contrasting flavors, textures, and temperatures—more than just a slice of cake and some berries on a plate. Over the course of my career it’s almost become taken for granted that desserts will have some sort of frozen element.
Back at the first restaurant job I had I basically created a pastry chef position out of thin air. We were buying a lot of our dessert components from other places and if we had ice cream on a dish it came from the grocery store next door—Häagen Dazs, only the best—so when we started making ice cream, all I had at my disposal was one and later two of those canisters that you put in the freezer for 12 hours and it does a quart at a time. In hindsight they probably were all pretty icy given the technology we were using—but we also had no idea about formulation.
It wasn’t until maybe five years later, well into my first full-time pastry chef position at Tribute, when I started to pay a little more attention to formulation. Certainly balancing fat, balancing sugars—not only for sweetness but slowly beginning to wrap my head around the functionality of sugars and how they affect texture.
As a young cook, at least at that time, you hear people say ice cream is just frozen crème anglaise. And when you’re incorporating other flavors you just add other flavors on top of that.
I was stuck in that rut of equating an ice cream base with crème anglaise, still using a lot of egg yolks, until even five years ago, about the time I was leaving Le Bernardin. I was teaching one of my first ‘ice cream technology’ classes, and one of the exercises I did was making 5 or 6 ice creams of varying fat content, some with egg yolks, some without. I tasted those side by side and realized, wow, my go-to formula (which included egg yolks) tastes like an omelet. So I very quickly shed that notion that egg yolks necessarily equate with quality. Custard ice cream can be wonderful and perfect, but other flavors come out so much brighter and cleaner when they’re not hiding under all that egg yolk.
CM: What ice cream are you eating right now, besides your own?
ML: I have to say, I don’t get out a lot—but one of my weekly guilty pleasures was Coolhaus ice cream sandwiches. They nail the textures of both the ice cream and the sandwich, which is basically under-baked chocolate chip cookies. I also got obsessed with mochi ice cream , and that’s still something that I can’t have enough of around.
CM: Why is it important to understand ice cream formulation? I usually start by explaining how sorbet works, because it’s basically sugar and water. Then in your class, you mentioned that you like to add things like non-fat milk powder to sorbets sometimes, so you can sort of build up to ice cream’s complexity.
ML: Once you have a deeper understanding of how ice cream works it does three things. It helps you create better product, it helps you fix mistakes, and then finally—the very elusive benefit to all this—it the potential to create something new. I am constantly telling people they have to know the composition of their ingredients, how they function, and then how to make adjustments.
The way you expressed it is perfect, that’s how I love to get people started thinking about it—start with sorbet, which is basically water and sugar. Then when you get up to ice cream you have other things, fats and proteins, and you need to understand how those function. I always point people towards the material that fruit puree companies put out, because they’ve figured this out. I remember one of the first times I saw the parametric recipe chart from a company like Boiron, it was amazing—and they come out with new ones every couple of years, readily accessible on their websites.
I have experience in larger operations where people want a silver bullet—one base syrup that will work across the board. It’s difficult, but possible. I’ve always preferred the bespoke syrup for each individual flavor, because it’s going to give you the best results. Another area that virtually everyone has a problem with until they understand how it works is alcohol— ‘can I put vodka in that? What about bourbon?’. Once you understand freeze point depression and molecular weight you can quantify all these things.
CM: It feels like we’re in something of an ice cream renaissance right now—why is this happening today?
ML: You know, I have several years’ worth of confectionary and ice cream industry trade magazines from about the turn of the century to the 1920s. The ice cream technology is the same—it’s a scrape-surface heat exchanger. This stuff has existed for decades, if not a century at this point. Ice cream formulation hasn’t really changed either, but pastry chefs working in fine dining restaurants were never exposed to that information. Within the last ten years it’s become something that people are much more aware of. In other words, fewer people are saying ‘ice cream is just frozen crème anglaise’.
There were two big watershed resources for me. The first was a specific book from Spanish pastry chef Oriol Balaguer, where he laid information out about ingredients and their uses, composition, and function in recipes. That book was one of the first places—we’re talking maybe 2002—I saw this information translated into language pastry chefs could understand.
The second was, a few years after moving to New York I was exposed to some material from a class given by Olivier Bajard. Olivier was one of the first pastry chefs to be part of this circuit of chefs who do classes around the world, a few days at a time, and this has been going on for maybe 15-20 years. That was always a great way to get into a lot of material.
I had written a little bit about ice cream on my own blog circa 2008-2009, and as a result I ended up connecting with Cesar Vega, a food scientist at Mars who essentially got his PhD in ice cream. He’s a great resource, and passionate about gastronomy. When you create that initial relationship, the chef—the practitioner—and the scientist, who has a lot of theoretical knowledge—you don’t always speak the same language. It took us a while to create a dialog where he wasn’t frustrated by my questions, and where I could understand his answers. He still doesn’t make it easy for me—I’ll come to him with a question or a problem and he’ll basically say ‘here’s the experiment I would do, you figure it out’.
The pursuit of knowledge for both chocolate and ice cream is a situation where the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. I realized that it’s really easy to make chocolate. And it’s really easy to make ice cream. It’s really difficult to make good chocolate and really difficult to make good ice cream.
The goal of small batch anything is to make the product better than the big commercial guys. That’s also difficult. Now, sure, industrial ice cream, industrial chocolate—they have to be dumbed down to a certain extent, to achieve consistency in the product and dial in very specific attributes. On a small scale, how do I achieve consistency, control for specific attributes, and not have to dumb it down? That’s where the creation of spreadsheets to look at recipes comes into play—we can fine tune recipe components to give us predictability and find the best possible formulation within whatever the constraints may be.
CM: What do you bring to ice cream that’s different because of your background in pastry more generally?
ML: There’s a series collaborations between Morgenstern’s and various chefs and right now it’s with Paul Liebrandt, who’s probably one of the most creative chefs in New York—I think this week it’s sunchoke ice cream with strawberry hibiscus sorbet. Some of those things are only going to come from someone who’s been thinking about how flavors interact for a long time.
Menu development: 'Peas and Carrots' - pea crumble, carrot sorbet, citrus cream.
A post shared by Michael Laiskonis (@mlaiskonis) on May 21, 2015 at 4:15am PDT
But you can be the most creative person in the world and just throw some things into an ice cream machine and it’s just not going to work. There’s a cliché that pastry chefs are the scientists of the kitchen, but really it’s all about predicting the future. If you’re making a soup you can tweak it, adjust it, change it from start to finish. But for a cake, I can’t take it out half way through and then decide ‘Oh! It needs more baking powder’. I have to put it in the oven and know exactly what’s going to happen 30 minutes later when I take it out. And the same thing applies to ice cream. To a certain degree we’re already hard-wired to look at these things from a mathematical point of view.
The whole last 10-15 years of cooking was about adapting things that industrial food scientists already knew but weren’t creative enough to do anything with. When you give tools like hydrocolloids to a chef who’s creative, you have a new library of textures and ways to deliver flavor.
CM: People play around with savory ice creams—have you ever made an ice cream that you felt like crossed a line or went too far into that territory?
ML: Maybe I’ve never been the person to push those boundaries. I almost hate saying the word but sometimes I find myself being fairly conservative. The older I get, when it comes to chocolate, I’m less prone to throw just anything in there, for example. I want to taste the flavors of the cacao beans.
Fresh cacao pod, after a long voyage from its home in the Davao region of the Philippines. #ICEChocolateLab pic.twitter.com/s8YhEdIlt0
— Michael Laiskonis (@mlaiskonis) March 10, 2017
Having said that, there’s always more that I can do to experiment, using things like maltodextrins, or—to show you what a geek I am—I got an invitation to some webinars on glucose production and the functionality of glucose. I use glucose every day, so I had a free opportunity to learn. I’ve been aware of maltose for years but never really used it as an ingredient in something, and just this morning I was learning more about maltose. It’s already got me thinking, because it has half the sweetness but the same freeze point depression as sucrose—that could be interesting.
One thing I also never really explored, and it’s just always been one of those weird concepts to wrap your head around, is ‘hot ice cream’ using methyl cellulose, which make things firmer as they get warmer, and then melt when they cool off. Really bizarre. I haven’t really seen anyone playing with that in several years, but it was a thing for a while.
CM: What comes next for you? Do you have any idea where all this work is headed?
ML: I don’t know. First and foremost, if I’m not learning something myself every day then that’s a waste. I realize I could open an ice cream or gelato shop tomorrow and probably do okay. I’m getting there with chocolate, but I still don’t know where that’s going.
Everything that I do is about sharing, whether it’s one-on-one with a cook in a consulting capacity, or for a client helping them perfect what they’re working on, or in a classroom, or on social media, wherever it is—I’m not keeping this for myself. Half the fun is sharing it with other people.
I’ve had many different book ideas and the longer I procrastinate, people keep coming out with the idea I would’ve done. It happened this week. Ali Bouzari handed me a copy of his book that dropped yesterday, and it’s brilliant—there are no recipes in it. It’s called Ingredient. A food book without recipes is very difficult to sell to a publisher. It basically looks at the building blocks of all food—water, sugars, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, lipids, etc—and attributes personalities to them. He writes in plain language how they function, how different processes work. I didn’t have the exact idea, but that’s the spirit of something I’ve wanted to do. Now I can cross that one off—he did a better job than I would’ve done, great—onto the next idea.
In general, I like the approach of taking something very simple that we can all relate to and breaking it down, whether it’s ice cream, gelatin, pectin, things like that. These are things that, in a pastry kitchen, we work with every day, but to some extent we just follow a rote recipe to make it work rather than understanding how it works. I can sit down and create an ice cream recipe from scratch without ever tasting it and know I’m going to get close to a good result. I’d like to adapt that to other preparations. Bread is something that works easily with that, because we already think about bread as percentage-based. But working with chocolate, and post-manufacturing applications, it’s hard to look at a ganache recipe and really get a sense of the ingredient proportions. This is something again where, just like ice cream, the fat, the water, your nonfat solids, it all has to be in a fairly narrow balance to get it to do what you want it to do.
Knowledge is the power to be able to make things better and to improvise and adapt to situations. To me that’s as exciting and fulfilling as creating something that’s never been created before. My to-do list now is probably infinitely long, longer than I’ll be able to ever accomplish. My perspective now is okay, whether it’s chocolate or ice cream or gummy bears, whatever it is—how do I take advantage of people who have done this for decades, where this is their expertise? We could do a lot to innovate gummy bears, but I want to nail the original first. Once you do that, then playing with flavors is easy. I’m not really interested in creating anything ‘Avant Garde’, I just want to make it the best it can possibly be.
For me—it sounds really boring—but there are infinite possibilities even just with vanilla ice cream. And that could keep me interested for quite a long time.
Chef Laiskonis was generous enough to share not one but *five* ice cream recipes with Churning Man readers, linked here for now. They are not for the faint of heart—they yield larger quantities home machines can likely handle (so you might need to scale them down), and some call for specialized ingredients. Email me if you want to try them but don’t know where to start.
