The innovative ice-cream makers at Salt & Straw serve up secrets and recipes in a new cookbook

By Mark Kennedy

If you’re intimidated by the idea of making ice cream at home, just think of it as making soup. That’s advice from Tyler Malek of Salt & Straw, the innovative gourmet ice cream maker known for its ever-changing lick-able treats.

“Making a pint of ice cream is very similar to making a pot of soup where if you have a good stock recipe — like chicken stock, vegetable stock — then you start just adding to it until it tastes good,” he says from his kitchen in Portland, Oregon.

“If you have really good stock base recipe, you could blend strawberries into it and make strawberry ice cream. You can drizzle chocolate into it and make chocolate ice cream. You can do really anything.”

The base is the base

That ice cream base is also at the heart of Malek’s latest cookbook,“ America’s Most Iconic Ice Creams: A Salt & Straw