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You might not know this if you're not in the restaurant industry, but Webster Groves' celebrated Serendipity ice-cream shop supplies some pretty exotic flavors to restaurant accounts for use in their dessert menus.
"Like saffron-basil ice cream. for example," said Serendipity's ice-cream chef, Mary Harden, "and cardamom-almond, and our take on lemon-ricotta. We've made many wine-based flavors. We did a sorbet made with Chartreuse. One time we made hollandaise ice cream for Oceano. We've made cinnamon-chipotle, cherry-chocolate-chipotle..."
Serendipity owner Beckie Jacobs realized that some of these exotic flavors might appeal to the foodies who visit the Serendipity counter, too. About a month ago she inaugurated the "Leap of Taste," a series of avant garde ice creams available at the shop and in take-home quarts, with a new flavor spotlighted each week.
The current Leap of Taste flavor is a summery blueberry-lavender.
"We had leftover lavender from making lavender-stout ice cream for a restaurant," said Harden.
Other Leap of Taste experiments for sale at Serendipity have included a cinnamon-quince ice cream inspired by Nico's Chef Grace Dinsmoor, and a tantalizing-sounding burnt honey-thyme-orange cookie crumble ice cream.
Tomorrow's new Leap of Taste flavor will be a star anise-plum-port wine ice cream, reported Harden. "My inspiration was the taste of poached plums," she said.
These flavors are available in limited quantities only, with but a single gallon for tasting and scooping behind the Serendipity counter. The remainder of each Leap of Taste flavor, made in a 4.5-gallon batch, is sold in quarts. If you sample it and like it, you can buy a quart then and there (if any are left). You might also try speaking to Harden about her mad-scientist plan for the next week's flavor, and maybe pre-ordering a quart.
The Leap of Faith is a lovely option for adventurous palates, but, said Jacobs, "it's [also] a great opportunity for Mary [Harden] to spread her wings."
Harden is a trained pastry chef who, before hopping on the ice-cream wagon, made desserts at the late, Latin American-cuisine stop Wapango in Chesterfield.
"At Wapango I got to experiment with different flavors of flan," said Harden. "They changed every month."
At Serendipity, the chef's experiments in ice cream have produced the unique flavors described above, but also, more than a few attempts that were not worthy of entering the larger world, she said.
"Some flavors just did not work," admitted Harden. "Mint julep tasted like taking a drink of milk after brushing your teeth. Tomato-basil sorbet tasted like tomato jam, which I sorta enjoyed, but others did not."
