Hope and reality and ice cream

It reminds me of my first Paul’s, though I do not get to taste it. It is called Banana Split-up. (Photo: Delicia Ryners)

By Marie-Lais Emond

26 Feb 2021

We took the chill temperature of Joburg’s ice cream scene and concluded: Jozi should scream for its ice cream, and plenty of it. It’s just so good.

We feel we deserve great pleasure when settling down to real ice cream treats. Because it seems like a special occasion, we’re always hoping, for the richest, creamiest, handmade, artisanal, coolest stuff.

I also want mine to be natural and local. I can get it. I don’t need those international chemical compositions any more. And yes, I like gelato, I like suckers, I like sorbets. Those are all individually interesting and can be great. But my definition of ice cream is an icy and creamy serving that has a custard base of some good sort.

In 1959 Walls started making ice cream in Boksburg on the Rand and Johannesburg became the first big city in South Africa to have ice creams available at almost every corner “cafe”. Soon they were all over the rest of South Africa. This is not to say that individual ice cream makers had not been selling their probably better, more homemade wares already at Joburg bazaars and in public parks before then. Ice cream had been increasing in popularity since the Second World War but Walls was making sure that everyone in Joburg who could afford to was eating theirs.

I remember eating ice creams that were either Neapolitan or rum-and-raisin. I was always slightly disappointed. It was that ice cream thing of hope and reality. The pink stripe in the Neapolitan could have been more strawberry and the brown stripe at least have tried to be more chocolatey. I didn’t know good vanilla in those days so that part, bland as it probably was, didn’t disturb me.

The rum-and-raisin was a funny sludgy-pink, which I call rum-and-raisin colour to this day. Maybe I didn’t know what rum tasted like exactly but I just knew that was not it. The raisins were ill-defined and disappointing. It wasn’t wholly unpleasant but what was it really?

It would take me 30 years to fix things for me and make and design an updated one for a slightly retro-restaurant in Jozi. Meanwhile, Häagen-Dazs brought out their rather-improved version in the ‘80s. Mine featured those big fat and, for some reason, always flat, hanepoot raisins soaked overnight in a South African marsala, added finally to a creamy egg custard, sweetened with light and dark molasses. I still like to make it when I see those particular raisins around.

Peta Frysh and I have done some similar things, like working for papers (she on The Sowetan in Aggrey Klaaste days), and directing films and videos, but I could never claim to make ice cream in any league similar to hers. Hers are one of Jozi’s most excellent ice creams, Pete’s SuperNatural Ice-Cream. Someone described them as “intelligently made ice cream”.

Perhaps that person should know since he was seeing Peta about a commission, I think, on the day I went to taste a few ice creams with her and chat, out in the easy restaurant courtyard behind Ba-Pita and other restaurants in Norwood. But he stuck around and finished every single tub we were just tasting, even a pre-release ice cream in which Peta and I were discussing the almond content. It was a lot of ice cream, well over half a kilogram.

I have said my sought-after Jozi ice creams have a custard base of some sort and Pete’s SuperNatural has that, with a slight difference. It uses GM-free tapioca instead of eggs in the base. The reason was not to effect a vegetarian ice cream, though that is a result, but because Peta found flavours were truer without the eggs and better coloured. All her flavours are natural and responsible and she’s really fussy about them, building up layers of taste like a chef. This is real, artisanal, small-batch ice-cream.

An example is Pete’s Popcorn Cream with Torched Marshmallows and Honeycomb. It’s a bomb of taste because all the ingredients are incorporated. There aren’t pieces of popcorn any more. They are the flavour now and were made in batches in Peta’s SuperNatural kitchen at her home, as is the ice cream itself. The marshmallows however are made by Moema (and once Ottolenghi) chef Danielle Postma but torched in Peta’s kitchen before being churned with her honeycomb into hormone-free farm cream. It’s a delightfully rich, nostalgic taste.

Most of Peta’s flavours are “Joburg-right” and often inspired by her longing for home comforts when she was eating ice creams for consolation in England, France and Australia. For instance, the Milk Chocolate flavour, though made with exceptional Valrhona Guanaja, does not have that ultra-dark snappy taste but the real comfort of Jozi-homely milk chocolate.

There are lots of Pete’s SuperNatural ice cream flavours, sold from the healthier places around Gauteng and especially Jozi, well over 10 of them. Quite a few restaurants and famous caterers use them. But I have a soft spot for the one that’s made with the fullest cream locally and wholly farmed Greek yoghurt, fresh lemon juice, blueberries and lemon zest. The most popular seems to be the ice cream that’s made by caramelising sugar, adding local Oryx salt, proper vanilla and churning with white Valrhona chocolate (another very Jozi taste) for unending salty sweetness.

The ice cream in development that Peta and I discuss already has a moreishly crushed and toasty praline topping and an almondy or maybe almondier interior. I, as a marzipan glutton, love where this one is going.

Scooping up Createry’s conceptually playful rooibos and condensed milk ice cream. (Photo: Adrielle du Plessis)

Here’s a big surprise. At the Fat Zebra restaurant in Linden, I meet a very young Bloemfontein woman with huge blue eyes and long blonde hair, now living in Jozi, who has been making very artisanal but immensely elegant Createry ice creams for not even a year. She is about to employ her first person to help her “with everything”.

So far I’ve been excited about her website, all her own design, the logo of her cat Bagheera hers, the van livery hers, the photography and even paintings of the product hers, the pottery hers. She’s in her 20s. She’s Adrielle du Plessis and she’s already a phenomenon, an artisanal, small-batch ice cream maker. Vovo Telo has snapped up her wares at all their outlets, as well as eateries like the Fat Zebra, in Linden and Parkhurst, “with ethics”. She’s had to start a Designer Range for all the clients who want individual flavours.

I think she knows she’s going very far because she says that “even then I’ll keep production to small batches – of everything. I want that”.

Adrielle is as she says “obsessed” with sustainability and being environmentally friendly and there’s nothing in or around the product that is not. She brought four of her ice creams for me to taste. She wipes the frostiness off the lovely little Consol jars that contain the 150 ml portions. The 500 ml containers are wholly recyclable too.

The ice creams are elegant, the tastes astonishingly sophisticated, even when conceptually playful, as with the Rooibos and Condensed Milk flavour. The bases are classically egg custard. Adrielle admits she has some antipathy to poultry products of all kinds so “really works those eggs” so that she can detect no egginess at all, just the beautiful custard they provide.

Her French Vanilla uses at least three types of real vanilla for a fuller, deep flavour, with the pod seeds, the dust from them and also the concentrate from the seeds. I don’t need to say anything. I can’t. I run out of superlatives. She has also brought a Milk Chocolate one, interestingly. She uses Callebaut chocolate in hers and the ratios are very different, I can tell. Although this isn’t a dark chocolate at all, it is not in the comfort as much as the already-addicted niche.

Adrielle’s best seller is also Salted Caramel. For vegans she has the Raspberry Cheesecake version I haven’t tried.

There is always hope with ice cream consumption but the reality of greatness and deliciousness seems assured with Createry.

It reminds me of my first Paul’s, though I do not get to taste it. It is called Banana Split-up. (Photo: Delicia Ryners)

My first Paul’s Homemade Ice Cream was Roast Banana that I ate at a playpark more than a decade ago. The real-thing custardiness of the ice cream got me instantly and I then tried something called Birthday Cake just to see how that could work out. It was interesting to taste the sponge cakey flavour (and some chunks of it), an unmistakable butter icingness and even something like bits of hard icing included in the ice cream. I understood. This was good stuff in a way that would not ever likely disappoint ice cream hopers. They’d get what they imagined. And the ingredients were good.

The Paul’s Ice Cream Pop-ups in the earlier days were magic too, with champagne to be drunk and cute things to eat, always in interesting places. Jozi loves a pop-up and these were exciting enough to get the brand out there. Apparently, they made no money whatsoever and “were just fun”.

That’s what Paul Ballen says when we really meet, in his boardroom at Paul’s Homemade Ice-Cream in Orange Grove, in a sort of light-factory area. It’s been quite some time since he experimented in his artist mother’s, Kate Ballen’s kitchen.

He was smitten by ice cream possibilities on family trips to the States. His dad is photographer Roger Ballen. There he’d try out all the great brands. Back home in the kitchen he’d add booze to some of them for parties. He was semi-serious even then.

He’s very serious now. The business is bulging and he has new premises, a three-storey building next door that will be the new home makery of Paul’s.

I tell him that what I think of as Paul’s Homemade ice cream “is good, custard based ice cream with interesting inclusions”. I ask him if that’s right and he nods and I ask what he’d add to that. He says “nothing” but does go on to say how big the company has become and that they “crack between seven and ten thousand eggs a day”.

The third person sitting in the boardroom is Nikita Singh, once with Bona magazine, a good Jozi food stylist and also sometime contributor about local foods to TGIFood. Here she is Head of Product Development.

I ask if there’s anything I could taste that’s new or newly relevant. Nikita says she’ll show me the production sections and that there’ll be something there. In haircaps and our usual anyway-masks, we mosey past all the cold rooms and ice rooms. In one of the rooms, she asks for some of the Hot Cross Bun base for the forthcoming Easter range. Apparently the Anti-Valentine range of products went exceptionally well.

One, interestingly reminds me of my first Paul’s, though I do not get to taste it. It is called Banana Split-up, of roasted caramelised banana and now has ripples of dark cherry compôte, dark chocolate fudge sauce and inclusions of peanut brittle. We scrape a bit off a solid-cold block and Nikita says it’s made with real hot cross buns in orange syrup. It doesn’t taste like much at this temperature and stage and has none of the finesses to be added later. I know all Paul’s stuff is from-scratch.

When I wonder at how far his business has come, how far from his artisanal ice creams of yore, I ask if the company ever uses the word “artisanal” any more. Nikita says they do, on the ice cream cake boxes and sometimes on social media, where they alternate it with the word “gourmet”.

Yes, Paul’s will always be good. It is expected to be and does not disappoint. And it led the way for all the other more recently artisanal ice cream kitchens in Jozi.

Nikita and I cut a tiny Easter egg off a chocolate nest arrangement. She says she loves the pineapple caramel centre of the egg. We divide it into quarters to taste and she says that at any Paul’s outlet “they want people to taste as many flavours as possible”. I am thinking about hope and reality and size. Paul’s is still about Jozi ice cream and it’s hugely successful. DM/TGIFood

Pete’s SuperNatural Ice-Cream 083 429 7969 Paul’s Homemade Ice Cream

Createry 082 281 2586 www.createry.co.za.

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