This is especially true for fast-casual restaurants for which ease and consistency is paramount. More and more, soft serve is an easy replacement not just for ice cream, but for any other dessert. With her new restaurant Young Joni, which serves dishes influenced by her Korean heritage in addition to her wood-fired pizzas, Kim has the opportunity to serve more inventive takes on soft serve, like a Thai tea version, to pair with the other flavors on the menu. “I know there are pastry chefs doing amazing, beautiful things, but for me simplicity is key,” she says. “I really wanted to bring something back that people had a soft spot for from their childhood and make it a little special,” she says.īut offering soft serve also gave Kim the opportunity to streamline her menu, allowing her to focus on doing just a few things well. Like Tosi, Kim had fond memories of visiting Dairy Queen and wanted to recreate that experience for her guests. Minneapolis chef Ann Kim found similar success when she got a soft serve machine for Pizzeria Lola back in 2010.
“I love making ice cream, but it’s always a challenge.” And when Eventide Fenway opens later this year, naturally, there will be soft serve. Now, rotating flavors of soft serve arrive to the restaurant’s shared tables topped with caramelized honey, honeycomb, or chocolate shell. Kim Rodgers, the pastry chef at Eventide Oyster Co., Hugo’s, and the Honey Paw in Portland, Maine, took note of Momofuku Milk Bar’s soft serve “as a fun thing” before trekking to New Hampshire to buy a used soft serve machine for the Honey Paw in 2015. And soft serve has really taken off in restaurants in the last few years, for exactly the reasons Tosi suggests. “I give them my highs, lows, and TMI the heck out of them from my successes and failures with the base and the machine,” she says. Tosi says that over the past seven or eight years, she’s gotten an email or a text every few months from people in the restaurant world looking to get into soft serve. It will always be the right texture and temperature, and just about anyone can pull the lever to quickly fill a cup with freshly churned dairy. The machine freezes the mixture at a temperature a few degrees warmer than hard-packed ice cream, which, combined with the greater proportion of air, give soft serve its signature texture.Īnd because soft serve is machine made, it’s consistent. The machine injects air (soft serve is at least 50 percent air, technically called overrun) into a base that contains at least 10 percent milk fat per FDA guidelines. Typically, it’s made without eggs and with stabilizers, and it must be made with a soft serve machine.
“I had to figure out how to make magic - how to create a thoughtful, inventive dessert how to prep it all myself in the middle of the night how to sell a cuss ton of it how to feed a lot of customers day and night with no pastry kitchen/station or cook how to get folks to eat dessert quick,” Tosi explains. Soft serve solved Tosi’s dessert program predicament in a way regular ice cream couldn’t. The idea of getting a soft serve machine for the restaurant “just hit me… I have so many happy childhood memories of grabbing cones at Dairy Queen. In 2007, Tosi, then Momofuku’s pastry chef, was tasked with launching a Noodle Bar dessert program that wouldn’t slow down “a troop of domineering male line cooks who weren’t exactly into the idea of a girl coming in, crowding up their space, putting precious obnoxious little desserts on the menu,” she says. The New York Times documented a wave of restaurant soft serve in 2008, but before that, Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi was a key player in the early days of the trend. “The infallible crowd pleaser has become a dessert crutch.”īut soft serve as sit-down restaurant dessert isn’t unique to these cities, and the phenomenon isn’t entirely new, either.