As a small business owner, you call the shots and check the boxes.
You're also who gets called when there's a workplace accident.
Luckily, there's an easy way to keep your employees covered.
As easy as Pi. Talk to your agent about workers' comp coverage from Pi.
Or go to PiInsurance.com. Safety first, then Pi Insurance.
Policies underwritten by the Pi Insurance Company or an affiliate.
Pi Insurance Services, Inc. is a licensed agent.
Offers may vary. Not available in all states.
Subject to all policy terms and conditions.
Next-level pet people will do anything for their dogs.
That means treating them with next-level protection from parasites with NexGuard Plus, afoxyloner, moxidectin, and parental chewable tablets.
NexGuard Plus chews provide one-and-done monthly protection against fleas, ticks, heartworm disease, roundworms, and hookworms, all in a tasty beef-flavored chew.
Used with caution in dogs with a history of seizures or neurologic disorders, dogs should be tested for existing heartworm infection prior to starting a preventive.
Ask your vet about NexGuard Plus Chews. Sirius XM Podcasts I love crunch.
We do. When I go to like Dairy Queen to get a Blizzard.
Yeah. What's your order? I mean, it's varied over the years.
Sure. But right now it's vanilla chocolate swirl ice cream.
Okay. With extra, extra, extra, extra Heath bar.
Whoa. I basically want like 50. Okay. I would get that without the chocolate ice cream.
I would just want like the vanilla and the heat.
Sometimes, yes. But like when I was growing up, I mean, I remember the Dairy Queen Blizzard when it was invented.
It was a seminal moment in my development as an eater.
Yeah. And I would go like vanilla ice cream, extra, extra M&Ms.
That was just my go-to. That's a lot of crunch.
Because when they freeze, they really get hard.
And back then, they were the full-size M&Ms.
None of these mini bulls**t. We could handle it.
This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Now, you know that I got a lot of ideas and opinions about food, right?
And one of my favorite foods in the world about which I have many ideas and opinions is ice cream and ice cream sandwiches.
For years, I've looked on with jealousy as other people have been asked by ice cream companies and stores to collaborate on unique flavors.
I even kept a Google Doc of ice cream and ice cream sandwich concepts just waiting for my phone to ring.
For years, all I heard was crickets. And not the kind of crickets you put on ice cream, which I did try, but did not put into my Google Doc.
Then, a couple months ago, I heard from the folks at Heap's Ice Cream in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
They had done a couple of collabs with local restaurants on really out-of-the-box ice cream sandwiches.
Like, they worked with the Chinese restaurant Winsun on one that paired Heap's mango sticky rice ice cream with a toasted soy sesame cookie.
Now they were reaching out to me to partner on a new ice cream sandwich.
It was time to call my Google Doc into action.
Now, one quick note, you're going to have to listen to the end to find out what my sandwich is, but I want you to know that it's going on sale this Thursday, August 14th at 7 p.m. at Heaps in Park Slope, and I'm going to be there for the launch.
So if you're nearby, I hope to see you there.
Anyway, my co-conspirator on this project would be Sarah Sané.
Sarah's the co-founder of Heaps, but long before that, she worked in fine dining.
Everywhere I've worked, I've made ice cream.
I worked at this place, the Biltmore Room, that sadly was not long lived in Chelsea.
And we made the most incredible ice cream.
It was this like macadamia brittle ice cream.
And I was like, oh, everyone is going to respond to this the same way I did.
And no one wanted macadamia brittle ice cream.
I was totally wrong. What? But I know it was demented.
Like it was so good. It would like stay crunchy, but then all that like fat from the macadamia nuts and the, oh my gosh, it was so good.
Yeah. After the Biltmore Room, Sarah landed at a seminal restaurant called Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which served chefy takes on diner classics.
The place was at the cutting edge of this trend of upscale comfort food that started in the 90s.
Sarah continued in that direction with her own place in the same neighborhood called Pies and Thighs, which specializes in fried chicken, biscuits, and all kinds of incredible desserts.
She still runs Pies and Thighs today. It's become a Brooklyn institution.
Then, about six months ago, Sarah became a co-founder of a new ice cream shop called Heaps.
Who doesn't want to own an ice cream shop?
And also, it's such a fun medium to keep making things and have new challenges.
And ice cream is so difficult in some ways to work with because I'm literally making all of the ice cream sandwiches, ice cream cakes, and...
It's not temperamental, but it is like a child because you have to understand it and then you can move it forward.
But if you like rush it, if you think it's being irrational, if you're in the wrong to me, if I'm in the wrong mindset, if I'm not like making an ice cream sandwich is going to take something close to two days.
It doesn't work. I've never made ice cream from scratch.
Like what in particular makes it so challenging?
There's a lot to the texture. Like if the sugar content gets too high, it gets like very soft, sometimes too soft for a cone.
And so then you've lost. That doesn't work.
It needs to be on a cone. For now, there are other folks who develop the ice creams for heaps.
Sarah handles everything non-ice cream, including the sandwiches.
And these ice cream sandwiches have become a mainstay at the place.
They use existing heaps ice cream flavors.
Then Sarah comes up with the cookies. As we said, ice cream on its own can be temperamental.
When you add a cookie to make a sandwich, it introduces a whole new layer of complexity, especially when it comes to one of my favorite subjects, structural integrity.
If the ice cream is too soft, it'll get forced out the back when you bite into the sandwich, right?
And if the cookie's too hard, you'll have the same problem.
The cookie has to be soft even when frozen.
And that is a challenge. The softness of the cookie is not like a function of bake time.
The recipe itself has to yield a cookie that has like lower gluten.
And when you bake it and it's done, it's still soft.
To achieve that softness, Sarah uses invert sugar.
It's essentially sugar in liquid form. So think like molasses, honey, or corn syrup instead of plain old granulated sugar.
She also reduces the gluten content of the cookie by swapping in lower gluten pastry flour for some of the all-purpose flour.
Once Sarah and I have covered the theoretical underpinnings of ice cream sandwiches, it's time to get down to brass tacks.
To make our ice cream sandwich, we need to figure out two things, the ice cream and the cookie.
Sarah's given me just one constraint. We have to use an existing Heap's ice cream flavor as our base.
Now it's time for a moment that's been years in the making.
I am going to bring up now, let me find it.
I have a Google doc entitled ice cream flavor and sandwich ideas.
Great. I'm not saying all these are great ideas and they're not all for use in, in our collab, but I'm just going to throw some out here.
Okay. Can't wait. One ingredient that I've always thought should be in an ice cream.
I've never seen it as fried plantains. What?
Hang on. I have to think. Cause I love cold fried plantains out of the fridge.
This is a wild place to start. That's incredible.
Next idea. Are you familiar with the Reese's Big Cups?
They're like gigantic peanut butter cups.
They originally launched with a few different varieties.
They had a Reese's Big Cup with potato chips in it.
Yes, I remember. I bought it. I got it at the gas station.
That one was bananas. Okay, for the potato chips to stay crunchy frozen, we'll need to enrobe them.
So they have to have some kind of, whether it's like a white chocolate or like a butter milk powder mix, something like that.
They'll have to have a coating on them so that they don't go when they get wet and freeze, you know?
Right, right. What if we were to put the potato chips outside around the perimeter of the sandwich?
They're still going to hydrate. Right, right.
And so you have to prevent them from turning into mush.
Right. Like this is the same reason why I think Oreos are better when they're in ice cream than by themselves, because I don't like how brittle they are as a cookie.
But when you mix them with ice cream, they soften a little bit.
And to me, they get better. Oh, no. What about soft batch?
They have an Oreo soft batch. There's cake stirs.
They have anticipated your needs. I'm starting to get the feeling that Sarah and I could go on like this for hours.
But back to the matter at hand. Sarah's concern fried plantains won't be so great when frozen.
They're out. Potato chips, also out. Unless we put them through an elaborate process, they're going to turn soggy.
I pitched Sarah on a third concept. Here's an idea I'm really excited about, Sarah.
Okay. You already have rum raisin ice cream.
Yes. Yes. Yes, Dan. Rum raisin is my favorite.
I love rum raisin. Yes, me too. I also, my mom and her whole family, they're from New England.
Okay. Where grape nut ice cream is a big thing.
Sure. Absolutely. I lived on Martha's Vineyard for two summers.
Lots of grape nut ice cream. Grape nuts are a cereal, and they have neither grapes nor nuts.
They were invented in 1897 by C.W. Post, the namesake of the Post Cereal Company.
And let's just say they're not quite as popular as they used to be.
They're these tiny cluster-like things about the size of nerds' candy, made of wheat and barley flour.
And without milk, they're hard as rocks.
But in New England, they put them in ice cream, which softens them a bit, and it's really good.
I think I had this once at some ice cream shop.
I can't remember where. Grape nut rum raisin.
Could the grape nuts be in the cookie? They could be, but I'm a little, I'm worried.
First of all, like as much as I love rum raisin, I love ice cream with a little crunch.
I want something crunchy in the ice cream.
Okay. But plain grape nuts are very brittle.
Very brittle. I have bridges that would fall out.
But put the grape nuts in the ice cream, they're better than grape nuts solo.
They soften a little bit, but they're brittle and hard enough to retain some crunch.
We'll see. We'll see. One tiny thing about frozen foods, they have to be slightly sweeter in order for your mouth to like respond to it as sweet.
So if you just take something and freeze it, it tastes like it's not sweet.
Right. And so I wonder if there's some way to like make the grape nuts shine outside of just texture.
Yeah. Let me throw one more idea at you.
Okay. I have always felt that more should be done in the dessert realm with Crackle and Oat Bran cereal.
No, Dan, that's not fair. That's not fair.
I did it. You did? I did it, Dan. And the people spoke and they liked it okay.
What? They liked it okay. The people are wrong.
We need to find new people then. Sarah's experiment with a crackling oat bran cookie was for pies and thighs.
So we made oatmeal raisin cookies and I used crackling oat bran.
It's coconut. It's oh, it's honey. It's toasty.
It's crunchy. It has so much fat in it. It's absurd.
Like it has everything to make it delicious.
Yes. So we would grind it up into a flour and chop it up as like a mix in in the cookie dough with raisins in an otherwise traditional oatmeal raisin cookie.
I'm going to make you a batch. Oh my God.
I'm so excited. It's the best. The coconut is the thing.
Like it's a little unexpected. Like it has so much going on.
It's got so much flavor and it always cracks me up.
People think that because it has the word oat bran in the title that it's healthy.
Like there's more sugar in crackling oat bran than in like Lucky Charms.
It's horrific for you. Horrific. I know.
I am extremely excited to hear that Sarah and I have this crackling oat bond.
But Sarah's cookie didn't work out at Pies and Thighs.
They took it off the menu. She's convinced it was not the fault of the concept, but that the cookie just got lost among their other offerings.
I thought that like the crackling oat brand mafia would like find it and be like, finally, someone has taken this perfect ingredient and made a cookie out of it.
I really thought that there was like a subculture of crackling oat stands like you and me.
They didn't find us, but maybe this is the opportunity.
I believe they're out there. I have to believe it.
All right. So look, I love the idea of some kind of like chewy crackling oat bran cookie.
Yes. Do you think that could pair with a grape nut rum raisin ice cream?
The thing is, like, we might be sitting in the corner of a huge auditorium at a table by ourselves eating these.
And the rest of the world is like, what is wrong with you?
No one wants that. I want that. Yes. So I think let's make it and see.
Will the, you know, kindergartner from across the street be like, finally, someone has paired rum raisin with your best and crack the note brand?
Like, maybe not. But that's the fun thing about like such a limited run and having this like, you know, creative prompt.
It's like, let's do it. Let's see. As we sit here today, it's July 3rd.
Yeah. And in order to have the recipe finalized and have it photographed and ready to put it on social and all that stuff, it needs to be totally done by August 1st.
That's right. Which is 29 days from today.
Okay. Can we do it? Absolutely. Cancel your vacation.
Coming up, the testing process begins and cracks form in our Crackle & Oat brand concept.
I do like that we start with something that we know is unmarketable.
Like no one wants what we're making. And then we finally get it to a place where we're like, well, this is delicious.
How can we ruin it? That's coming up. Stick around.
Time to cook up some advertisements. If you heard our recent episode in which I ate my way across Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, then you know how much fun I had.
You know how delicious it was. The soul food at Big Mike's, the coffee and incredible brunch at Croissant's Bistro and Bakery, and the fish and quail and duck at Rivertown Bistro.
And when you go to Myrtle Beach, you can soak in the sunshine along 60 miles of beaches.
You can take a dip in the ocean, dine on fresh seafood, get post-beach ice cream, sip colorful cocktails by the pool, and then listen to live music outside Myrtle Beach's many beach bars.
Now I know what you're thinking. But Dan, I've already planned my summer.
I already have my summer trips all worked out.
How can I squeeze in Myrtle Beach? Well, I'll tell you how.
Make your summer longer. That's the beauty of Myrtle Beach.
Air and water temps stay nice and warm well past Labor Day, so you can hold on to that sweet summer vacation feeling without the bustle of peak travel season.
Not ready to let go of summer just yet? Get some more at The Beach, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Start planning at visitmyrtlebeach.com. Comcast Business helps retailers become seamlessly restocking, frictionless paying favorite shopping destinations.
It's how nationwide restaurants become touchscreen ordering, quick serving eateries, and how hospitals become the patient scanning, data managing, healthcare facilities that we all depend on.
With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business is powering the engine of modern business, powering possibilities.
Restrictions apply. You may recall last year we did an episode of The Sporkful called When is a Taco Legally a Sandwich?
And our guests in that episode were Josh Scherer and Nicole Eneati from the podcast A Hot Dog is a Sandwich.
And one of my messages to you in that episode was that you should be listening to their podcast.
You probably know Josh and Nicole from the YouTube channels Mythical Kitchen and Good Mythical Morning.
Well, on their podcast A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, they discuss hilariously controversial culinary quandaries.
If If you love The Sporkful, check out A Hot Dog is a Sandwich.
I think you're going to love it, too. Follow and listen to A Hot Dog is a Sandwich wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman.
Last week on the show, we played our annual game show, Two Chefs and a Lie.
This year, I'm emceeing, and our contestant is Rachel Hampton, host of the podcast Normal Gossip.
We introduced Rachel to three guests. Two are real chefs.
One is just pretending to be a chef. She can ask each of them five questions, then has to try to pick the liar.
In this edition, one of the so-called chefs shares a crazy story from her private chef work with a client.
She doesn't do any of the nightshades with the exception of peppers.
So no potatoes, no tomatoes, no eggplant, no rice.
We're like boiling vegetables, making stocks, only mountain valley spring water.
Wait, wait, you're... Yeah, you heard me right.
You're making chicken stock with bottled water?
Yeah. Well, I mean, in her very meager defense, I will say she has it delivered in big glass bottles, so they are reusable.
But yeah, it's pretty something. Is that real?
Or is that guest our liar? Listen and play along.
See if you can spot the liar. That episode is up now.
One more quick note. Make sure you stick around to the end of this episode for a special segment brought to you by Samsung, in which I nerd out on one of the most important topics in the culinary world, ice cubes.
That's at the end of this episode. Now, back to my attempt to create a new ice cream sandwich with Sarah Sané of Heap's Ice Cream in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
And a quick reminder, the sandwich goes on sale this Thursday, August 14th at 7 p.m. at Heap's.
Anyway, in early July, Sarah and I came up with our concept of grape nut rum raisin ice cream on a crackling oat bran cookie.
Now, in order to give her time to make enough for the launch and get it photographed for social media and all that, the sandwich has to be finished by August 1st.
That does not give us a lot of time. Sarah hunkers down in her ice cream sandwich lab, a.k.a. the cramped basement prep area of her restaurant.
After a couple weeks, she invites me to join her there for a taste test.
Okay, so... The basement has stainless steel countertops everywhere, ingredients stacked on shelves, and the dishwasher.
Sarah tells me it took her a while to source the crackling oat bran and grape nuts.
They might be even less popular than we thought.
Well, she did find the grape nuts. It's like, dang, it's been like many tens of years since I have eaten grape nuts.
I'm going to try them. And so I put some in a container.
I put the milk in. I let it sit for a minute.
And then I ate so fearfully because now at 44, I have tooth work.
Right. Like there are things that can get dislodged and it honestly like seemed to pose a threat.
So I don't know if I'm going to be like buying boxes and boxes of grape nuts.
Right. But as we discussed, they will soften in the ice cream.
Yes. There's also like, I like that when you're eating them out of the box, like with milk, there's a window.
You have like, you know, 15 minutes of like a liquidy milk and a soft grape nut.
You got to dive in. I could derail this entire conversation.
I could spend the next hour talking to you about the optimal window of consumption of various cereals.
How long should it sit in the milk before you enter the optimal window?
And then how long does the optimal window last before you get to the other side?
Once again, Sarah and I are veering off track.
We'll save our discussion of the window of optimal consumption of various cereals for another show. it for at least a minute, maybe two.
So remember, we got to pick an ice cream and a cookie.
Sarah and I'll test the ice cream first.
She's been experimenting with the best way to mix grape nuts in.
She pulls out six small test batches. She's using vanilla so we can isolate the various grape nut options and focus on that.
Once we decide which one we like, we can add that grape nut treatment to Rum Raisin.
There's a control, so that's just grape nuts in vanilla ice cream.
There's sauté. That is, I literally sautéed grape nuts in butter and let's see what else.
Salt. And then I put just a little bit of white chocolate at the end.
And then the other four are all toasted.
Sort of like varying degrees of toasted.
And then there are a few different variables, which are like salt, white chocolate, toast level.
And one of them I put milk powder in. sort of like see if that had a sealing effect also or what it did if it made it taste like grape nuts and milk i don't know you're the pro here what order should we be testing these in i think we should start with control okay just get ourselves a baseline classic grape nut i think so okay there's a spoon for you all right i'm going in go in crunchy not soft that's delicious yeah dirty spoons in here okay we try the grape nuts sauteed in butter Subtle.
Then we try a version with the grape nuts and clusters, which Sarah made by sauteing them in butter and adding white chocolate to hold them together.
Like, as a nation, we've decided clusters are the thing.
So I'm like, maybe that is like an exciting new way to think about grape nut ice cream.
I'm intrigued by the clusters. Okay. Whoa.
Whoa. Whoa, that's really good. Wow. Oh, man.
Oh, man. I think that that's delicious. It's really good.
The test is that, like, I, after dinner, would pull a pint of this out and just, like, start eating off the top.
The clusters are the clear winner. But I do think we can up their flavor just a little bit.
Sometimes when I make an ice cream sundae or even just a scoop of ice cream, I sprinkle a little flaky salt on it.
Sure, yeah. Can we try the clusters again with a little bit more salt?
Hang on. Okay. Hold that thought. All right.
Sarah just ran away. Sarah ran away. She comes back with the clusters on their own in a container, not an ice cream.
We start playing with those, adding some more salt.
Toss that around. Yeah, definitely better and heightened.
Yes. Let's put a note in the dock, shall we?
So I'm going to put these back in the freezer for a second so we don't lose them, and we're going to move on to cookie.
Okay, let's do it. All right. Now, the cookie.
As we discussed in our first conversation, Sarah's whipped up the cookie she used to make for pies and thighs as the baseline.
It's got crackle and oat bran ground up and mixed into the flour.
Then she's made versions with grape nuts in the dough, grape nuts sprinkled on top, one with chunks of crackle and oat bran, one that also has coconut.
They all look like sugar cookies with different things mixed in.
Before we even get to tasting, most interesting and surprising to me as I look at these different test samples is when I dreamt about it, it never looked anything like this.
Oh, what did it look like? It was more like, imagine if you made like a graham cracker pie crust.
Okay. But with crackle and oat bran. Oh, interesting.
Like a... As you may know, with a graham cracker pie crust, you crush up graham crackers, mix them with some butter and sugar, and press them into a pan.
I'm imagining something similar, but with crushed crackle and oat bran.
So it's not a cookie with crackle and oat bran in it.
The whole thing looks like crackle and oat bran.
Sarah likes this idea. She thinks it simplifies the vision of the overall sandwich.
So now we have a new direction. But we might as well try the cookies she's already made.
And they all have one thing in common. None of these are punching me in the face with crackling oat bran.
I want to be punched in the face with crackling oat bran.
We've made some progress here. So much progress.
We're excited about the clusters. We love clusters, yeah.
With a little more salt and maybe a few other tweaks.
Yeah. The cookie, we have a shared, we have a mind meld image in our heads.
The question is, how do we make that a reality?
Yeah. All right. Well, I can't wait to come back for the next test.
I'm glad it didn't come on the first pass.
Isn't it more fun? Yeah, for sure. If it comes too easy, then it feels like you didn't even earn it.
I know. Yeah. All right, Sarah, I'll see you in a week.
I'll see you in a week. A week later, Sarah and I reconvene at Pies and Thighs.
It's just three days until our deadline.
We have got to lock in and make some decisions.
We have two big goals for the day. Confirm that we're good to go with the grape nut clusters in rum raisin ice cream, then decide which crackling oat bran cookie we'll use.
We start with the ice cream. Rum raisin with grape nut clusters.
Yum. It almost tastes like eggnog-y to me.
Is there cinnamon in here? Something tastes cinnamon-y to me.
Yeah, there's cinnamon, there's nutmeg, there's like the sort of flavors of rum in the ice cream, and then, you know what it is?
It's nutmeg that you're tasting. I'm going in for another taste.
Okay. The raisins are huge California raisins.
Very beautiful and juicy, but you've got to get a raisin to get the full rum raisin experience.
I mean, this is really good. I agree that it tastes a lot like eggnog.
It's eggnoggy. Yeah. And I love eggnog. I do too.
I'm not positive that that's right for a summertime ice cream sandwich.
That ship may have sailed. But let's go on because I... Well, the other option is a straight vanilla.
Does it need a fruit? Does it need a swirl?
No. Does it need a jam? I didn't know that was even an option.
Sure, we can do whatever. Sour cherry. Always my favorite.
Would that work with rum raisin, you think?
Let's try. Let's try. We have it. Oh, you have cheese.
It's great to develop recipes in a restaurant.
Right. Okay. We're in the walk-in now. We're in the walk-in fridge.
Is it the fridge or the freezer? This is a fridge.
We're in the fridge. Oh, sour cherry jelly.
I see it right there. We have sour cherry jelly.
Let's try. Let's see what's good. Coming out of the walk-in.
At this point, do you feel how I feel, which is like we were unchaperoned.
We were left to make poor decisions, and now we have to live with them.
Sarah composes a bite for each of us with the grape nut rum raisin ice cream and sour cherry jelly on top.
Wow. I think it's amazing, but it's definitely a different direction.
Mmm. See what I mean? Like fireworks. Rains.
That's got a lot going on. It's got a lot going on.
The sour cherry jelly does make the ice cream taste less like eggnog, but now I'm concerned that we're losing the rum flavor.
We're going to do sour cherry again. We decide to try the grape nut clusters with sour cherry swirl in vanilla ice cream.
I mean... I love it. That is so good. It's very dynamic and delicious.
It's almost like because we took away, it was a little too busy.
You have to edit. Yeah, you got to kill your darlings.
It helps that heaps of vanilla is really good.
This might be our ice cream flavor. We move on to the other component of the ice cream sandwich, the Cracklin' Oat Bran cookie.
Sarah has made two versions. Both are ground up Cracklin' Oat Bran, sugar, salt, coconut, and butter pressed into a sheet pan.
The difference is that one is baked and the other is not.
We try both versions of the cookie with the grape nut ice cream.
I'm going in. So this is, you're trying the baked.
I think. You're making kind of a yucky face.
I am making yucky paste. The crackling is not coming through for me.
I think that if we can make the crackling oat bran work, it's really fun.
I just feel like... I just don't like it.
I don't want us to lose the crackling oat bran because I feel like you and I were so excited about that at the outset.
We both have this deep belief that crackling oat bran should be in desserts.
Let's try the other one. Okay. Okay, so this one unbaked.
Mmm. I can't taste it. I can't taste the crackling oprah.
I'm going to try to just bite off the crackling oprah and bottom.
What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I agree with you that I don't taste a whole lot of crackling oat bran.
What's happening, Sarah? Why would an uncooked crackling oat bran, a crust made almost entirely of crackling oat bran, not taste like crackling oat bran?
Well, we talked about this at the beginning, that flavors are really dulled by freezing.
And so if you're making a mix-in or a crust or something, you really have to pump up the sweet, the salt.
It has to be pretty... Supercharged? This is something I've known for a long time about temperature and foods in general.
I mean, this is why you should take cheese out of the fridge one to two hours before serving so it comes to room temp and has more flavor.
Ice cream has more flavor and aroma when it's a bit melted versus frozen solid.
It seems the magical taste of Crackle and Oat Bran is especially susceptible to the effects of freezing.
I don't think we're going to get closer to what we want.
I think we'll make a delicious cookie. but I don't think we'll end up taking a bite and feeling more essence of crack than O'Brien.
I'm reluctantly and a little bit sadly coming around to the same point of view, which is like, sometimes things sound good in theory, and then you make them, and they're not as good as you hoped they would be.
But I think we're on the path to something good.
The grape nut clusters is what we stumbled into.
Yes, and a fruit swirl. The things that were most delicious to us are the grape nut clusters.
Yes, on their own. In some kind of ice cream with the fruit swirl.
Yes. I like vanilla fruit swirl grape nut clusters.
That sounds like a delicious ice cream to me.
Okay. That felt like fireworks. Yes. So of all the different bites last week and this week that we've taken, that was the thing.
That's the most exciting. Right. Yes. Agree.
So let's focus on that. Okay. Let's focus on that.
I'm coming around to your point of view because of all the things we've eaten, that was the best.
Yeah. So rum raisin is definitely out. The eggnog vibes were nice, but it didn't feel like summertime, and the rum flavor was kind of getting in the way of everything else.
The ice cream will be vanilla with grape nut clusters and a sour cherry swirl.
But for the cookie, we've hit a dead end.
For a minute, Sarah and I feel a bit stumped.
What else goes with that? We start spitballing.
Could it be something peanut buttery? Could it be pie dough?
Nuts? Rosemary shortbread? Is there any space in these cookies for chocolate chips?
What if it was like an oatmeal crust? But what about like a coconut macadamia cookie?
God, no. It's too much. It's too much. There's not enough room on the sign.
Like, there's no way. It's like, okay. I don't know.
I feel like I need more time. I need to think about the cookie.
Sarah says she'll try out some oatmeal cookie options for one more test in a couple days.
I think after this we should close the innovation kitchen and start figuring out like the manufacturing and the packaging, like all the other things that happened before we sell them.
No more new ideas allowed after this. No, we're done with new ideas.
We're only eliminating ideas now. We're editing.
Yeah, we're editing. Over the next 48 hours, Sarah spent some time brainstorming on her own, putting her pastry chef skills to use.
When I left our last testing session, we agreed we would not allow any more new ideas.
When I come back in the day before our deadline...
So we have seven cookie options here. We have two fully assembled cookies, and then we have four ice cream options.
Someone out there can do the math for like, if you multiply all those.
I'll check with, I have some friends who went to MIT.
Oh, yes. There are so many options here that our final sandwich has to be among them.
Sarah's made a few oat cookie options, but she's also made a whole other category of cookies, which aren't even really cookies.
This is a complete surprise to me. It's pie crust.
Sarah had mentioned pie crust offhand during our previous test, but I didn't know she was going to take that and run with it.
Then again, I guess for someone who owns a place called Pies and Thighs, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I'm excited. I love an oat cookie, but I'm also intrigued because I've never seen an ice cream sandwich in any kind of like a pie dough cookie.
Well, we'll see. Maybe there's a reason.
Sarah has our ice cream filling for us to put on each option.
The first version of the pie crust cookie was weighted down when it was baked, so it's flat with flaky layers pressed together to make it a bit dense.
Mmm. Mmm. I am so impressed with, because we talked at the beginning about structural integrity.
This is so good. I was worried that this pie crust ones would be like too hard.
No, it really works. But they're like an amazing middle ground of being a little bit crispy and crusty, but it still gives to the bite in a way that does not push ice cream out the back.
Yeah, and it's like recognizably pie dough, you know?
I love that. We're trying so many things.
I had no intention of eating full samples of each, and I just ate that.
That's a good sign. Yeah. Next, we try one of the ones that was not weighted, so it's a bit taller and a bit puffier looking.
It doesn't look exactly like a biscuit, but it looks a little bit biscuit-esque.
Yes, it has. Maybe I love flaky layers. It really has flaky layers.
Okay, sandwich for you. It has a lot more...
Lift. Right. It's probably twice as high.
Slightly less caramelized, but it has the flaky layers have flaked.
They weren't like forced together. Right.
That's very fun. Yeah. it sort of like gives to the tooth a tiny bit easier.
Is that what the pros say? Yeah, sure. The one that has more lift on it has more dynamic contrast because it's a little bit, it's crispy on the outside, but it's a bit chewy in the center as opposed to the flattened one was kind of like just crispy.
Yes, I agree. I really enjoy that. And I think it's a fun thing that we invented, this like pie dough pocket filled with ice cream.
You invented it, Sarah. I'm giving you the credit for this.
We're on the road together here. I'm very happy with that.
We try the various oatmeal cookies just to cover all our bases.
They're good, but they're not as special as the pie crust.
Sarah and I agree we've never had an ice cream sandwich on pie crust.
So decision made. We're sandwiching the ice cream between two layers of flaky pie crust, the unweighted ones, which are a bit lighter and chewier.
But wait, there's one more thing for us to decide.
Should we dust the pie dough with cinnamon sugar or plain sugar?
Sarah's made both. After we take one more bite of each version, she's sure.
Okay, so just sugar on the pie dough. That's it.
100%. Agreement from all nations. In the background shouting, where is Sarah's niece Lily?
She's from France. And where is the slang for we or yes?
I have to agree. This is... So good. Yeah.
That might get my highest rating, which is demented.
Like that is very good. Lily goes in for another bite too.
Very wet. Very wet. That is Lily's highest rating.
The most wet. Very most wet. This is very like top three best things you've ever made.
Wow. Whoa. Whoa. High five. Excuse me, I was here too, Lily.
Perfection. And with that, an ice cream sandwich is born.
We decide to name it the Cherry Crisp a la Mode Sandwich.
Vanilla ice cream with grape nut clusters and a sour cherry swirl between layers of pie crust.
It's such a great commentary on the creative process because where we ended up is so different from where we started.
So different. It's so dynamic. There's a lot happening in here.
Yes, the only thing that's in here that we originally set out with is Grape Nuts.
That's true. And this is so yummy. It's also sort of a marriage of pies and thighs and heaps and the sportful.
We've got everybody in there. It's all coming together.
Totally. I think it's great. This sandwich has a lot of dynamic contrast.
Yes, it does. Because you've got the crunchiness of the grape nut clusters, you've got the syrupyness of the jelly, and then you have this... And the sour, the jam...
With the ice cream is phenomenal. I also am like, who knew that this jam would freeze into something that's fantastic?
Even new like horizons for the sour cherry jam here.
That's right. And as you were saying that like some things lose a lot of flavor when you chill them.
It really stands up. What are the chances that this becomes a permanent menu item in heaps?
Zero. Not possible. Not possible. Did I say it fast enough?
None. None. Zero. Is it a pain in the ass?
Is that the question? Yeah. Sorry. Is it a huge hassle to make all the different components 100%?
That part we have failed at. If someone was like, okay, how do I turn this into something that could actually come to market and have a reasonable return?
No. This is not it. This has failed. All right.
I'm going to take one more bite for the road.
Please. What do we do with the Cracklin' Oat Bran boxes?
You want to take some with you? I'm serious.
We have a lot of boxes. Sure. I'll take one for the road.
All right. As I said, our Cherry Crisp a la mode sandwich goes on sale this Thursday, August 14th at 7 p.m. at Heaps in Park Slope.
And Sarah and I will be there. She's making 250 sandwiches.
And since my family is going to be eating eight of them, that leaves 242 for the rest of you.
Now, if they sell out quickly, Sarah will make more, but this is a limited-time-only situation.
Unless they sell out so fast that Sarah has to add them to the menu full-time.
All right, that probably still won't happen, but a guy with a Google Doc can dream.
Anyway, I hope to see you there. My thanks to Sarah Sané of Heaps Ice Cream and Pies and Thighs for making my ice cream sandwich creation dreams come true.
Next week on the show, I head into the woods in search of pawpaws, one of the only tropical fruits native to North America.
While you wait for that one, check out our annual edition of Two Chefs and a Lie.
Play along at home, see if you can guess the liar.
That one's up now. Check it out. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM.com slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And this is Andrew Loveman in New York, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
This segment is brought to you by Samsung Bespoke Appliances.
Recently, I met up with chef and cookbook author Casey Elsass in the Samsung test kitchen.
Now, the folks at Samsung might be the only people who care as much as Casey and I do about a crucial factor in any cold beverage.
So, Casey, you have a phenomenal new cookbook called What Can I Bring?
Mm-hmm. Sometimes you bring drinks. Yes.
How much thought have you put into ice cubes?
When you're working a bar, an ice cube is very important.
The purpose of an ice cube, two things, chilling the drink and diluting the drink.
There's always a balance you want to play with those things.
But not all ice is created equal, okay? And Samsung has freezers that offer multiple kinds of ice to suit whatever you're mixing.
Big cubes or spheres, crushed ice, even smaller trapezoidal cubes.
If it's a mixed cocktail, something you would put in a shaker, you want a lot of dilution and you want it to cool down really quickly.
So those would be the smaller standard size ice cubes.
Anything that's more of like a sphere ice, a square ice, that's for very slow dilution, high chill.
So that would be anything that's alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, like Manhattan, old fashioned, anything like that.
If you're stirring, that's the kind of ice you want in the glass.
Right. What about a cocktail that's served with crushed ice?
Tiki drinks, frozen drinks, those are high summer.
That is a party drink. Right. Mint juleps?
Yes, mint juleps. I love ice. Samsung even has its own shape of ice called Ice Bites.
Bigger and more solid than crushed ice, but still a lot smaller than cubes.
A perfect happy medium. And delicious on their own.
I took AP Bio. I didn't do especially well.
There's only one thing I remember from that class, surface area to volume ratio.
It is actually very relevant in food. It's like how much surface area does the thing have in relation to how much volume it has?
For example, a steak fry versus waffle fries.
They might have the exact same total amount of potato, but a waffle fry has a lot more surface to touch potato. the frying oil and turn crispy.
And it's the same thing with ice. The more surface area in relation to volume, the faster it will melt.
Right. A bunch of smaller ice cubes are going to hit more parts of the drink faster.
That's right. So if you're thinking about a sphere or a square, it's really only cooling down the parts of the drink that are touching the ice, which is a very small amount.
Pop quiz. What shape has the lowest surface area to volume ratio and thus the slowest melting rate?
I think a sphere, because the bottom of the drink doesn't even get cold.
It's really only the top where it's hitting the fat part of the circle.
See, you didn't fail, Casey. Yes, you were right.
A sphere is the lowest surface area to volume ratio.
It's the slowest melting ice cube. All right, well, thank you for nerding on ice with me, Casey.
I really feel seen. And great news for all you sphere lovers out there.
Sphere is the newest ice shape offered from Samsung bespoke fridges.
Look, if you care about drinks, you should care about ice.
And Samsung cares about ice. And if they put that much thought and effort into something that seems so trivial, imagine how much care and consideration they put into the big stuff.
Thanks again to our sponsor, Samsung, for inviting us to test out their new product features.
And let me tell you, these same fridges that make all these kinds of ice, they also have a beverage center that provides quick and easy access to refreshingly cold filtered water in two different ways, an internal dispenser or a built-in autofill water pitcher.
Samsung's new line of bespoke AI appliances simplifies your time in the kitchen.
So it's no wonder that Samsung has the highest ice maker satisfaction rate.
Visit samsung.com slash bespoke to learn more.
Based on a leading customer review, aggregators analytics of positive sentiment and consumer review among leading refrigerator manufacturers as of April 1st, 2025.
The SmartThings app is available on Android and iOS devices, a Wi-Fi connection and a Samsung account are required.
