Ice cream
by Diana Cercone
If there’s a universal comfort food, it’s gotta be ice cream. Nothing like it soothes a skinned knee, eases the hurt of a heartache or lifts the spirits on a tough day. Doesn’t matter the season. Still, come summer, ice cream is essential. Like a hot dog at the ball park, it’s just not summer without it. No surprise then that ice cream is the most popular street food.
From Rome, New York and Saigon to Paris, Mumbai and Moscow, ice cream aficionadas (OK, addicts, and I admit to being one) happily queue in line to get their fix of this comforting and cooling confection. For in just a few minutes, they know that happiness will be theirs.
Here in Bucks County, it’s no different. From Ottsville to Lambertville and Wrightstown, and from Newtown to Doylestown to Ivyland, adults and children alike patiently wait their turn at OwowCow Creamery, Goodnoe’s or Tanner Brothers Dairy to place their orders for ice cream.
Then there are the ice cream memories. Everybody has a favorite. Could be, like my sister Patti’s, as simple as waiting to hear the tinkling bells of the ice cream truck turning onto our street. My friend Ruth remembers Sunday drives with her family from their home in Philadelphia to Goodnoe’s. And another friend, Bryan, who grew up in Pineville, recalls backyard barbecues that were never over until he and his cousins cranked the family’s ice cream bucket.
Which reminds me: Next time you’re at the Doylestown Farmers Market (Saturdays, 8 a.m.-noon), stop by Trauger’s Fruit and Vegetable stand and ask Myron Kressman, the family’s patriarch (as well as the market’s) about his homemade ice cream. He makes it with the freshly picked fruits and berries from his orchards. You can’t buy his ice cream. But you can buy his fruit and berries to make your own. Being the sweet and generous man he is, Myron will even share his family recipes.
For longtime residents of Bucks, it’s the memory of the now closed but still much mourned Greenwood Dairies on Route 1 in Langhorne, home of the Pig’s Dinner. The super sundae was know nfor its legendary large scoops of ice cream in several flavors of your own choosing. Those brave enough to clean their plate, well trough, were awarded a badge of honor—a pin proudly proclaiming, “I was a Pig at Greenwood Dairies.” So famous was Greenwood’s Pig Dinner that Calvin Trillin visited the Bucks County establishment and wrote about its pig dinner in a 1969 New Yorker article.
With the area’s bounty in dairy farms and orchards, Bucks County is still prime ice cream country. And with ice cream parlors throughout the county, it’s still a prime draw for making ice cream memories. Case in point is OwowCow Creamery, where for the last six years customers have been happily returning to make some of their own.
Count me as one. And decided it was time to sit down with OwowCow’s owner and artisan ice cream maker, John Fezzuoglio, and talk about what makes his ice cream such a draw.
Though it was a few days before spring on the day we met, a hot sun foretold of the lazy ice cream days to come. John was already waiting for me at OwowCow’s newest location on North Union Street in Lambertville. Before turning artisan ice cream maker, John was a graphic artist. When it comes to his creamery, he still is. He designed OwowCow’s logo and accompanying graphics as well as the interiors of his three locations. (The others are in Ottsville and Wrightstown.) For his Lambertville creamery, John restored the circa 1950 building to its original brickwork and high ceiling, creating an open, yet warm and inviting atmosphere. Interestingly, he says, at one point during the building’s history, it housed a Breyer’s ice cream store.
John suggests we grab a couple of stools by the counter along one of the brick walls. Joining us is Shira Tizer, OwowCow Creamery’s general manager.
So how did he become an artisan ice cream maker? As if nothing could be more natural, John says, “Who isn’t interested in ice cream? It’s a happy food.” Turning more serious he says, “I wanted to create something singular—in a manner no one else is doing.”
All ice cream starts with a base cream. Commercially produced ones, he says, are generally made with cheaper ingredients, including high fructose sugar and emulsifiers, including diglycerides, to ensure long shelf-life. Not accepting that route, John set out to design a better base usually local ingredients.
But first he enrolled in Penn State’s Ice Cream Short Course to learn the principles of making ice cream. Even there, he says, they added artificial colors and flavors to a commercial base. That wasn’t for him either and he returned to Bucks still committed to using local, natural and/or organic ingredients.
To finish reading about our favorite summer comfort food, turn to page 72 in the Summer 2015 issue of Bucks County Magazine.