Episode Details

Takeaways

• Community is part of the business plan: Alise sees her marketing as bringing people along for the ride, and David says the same is true for an ice cream shop.
• Great cheese starts with great milk, and Alise's family has bred their cows for higher fat and protein for about 40 years, which shows up in the cheese.
• Not standardizing the milk means each batch is a surprise, since many of the cheeses age at least six months before the team learns how that day's milk turned out.
• Cheese needs four ingredients, milk, cultures, rennet and salt, and salt is easy to overlook in cheese and in ice cream.

Summary of the Episode

In this episode of The Ice Cream Social, host David Boyer continues his conversation with Alise Sjostrom, founder of Redhead Creamery. Alise shares that she and her husband moved home in 2012 and broke ground in 2013. She measures the years by her daughter, who was three weeks old when they moved back.

The two talk about why community sits at the center of both a cheese business and an ice cream shop. Alise describes her marketing as bringing people along with her, and David says he knew when he wanted to open an ice cream shop that he would need to develop a community. Alise then describes the space they built: a cheese shop, a kitchen and a community space that seats 75 people comfortably, with a private speakeasy on the side. The goal was to seat an entire bus at once, where before they could seat about 16 and had to split the group.

David asks about the cheese process, and Alise says it takes both art and science. She starts with really good milk. Her parents have been dairy farming together since 1979, and her dad bred their cows for high fat and high protein long before farmers were paid on milk components. Redhead Creamery does not standardize its milk, so with cheeses that age at least six months, the team finds out later what each batch became.

Alise then walks through the four ingredients of cheese: milk, cultures, rennet and salt. She explains how rennet solidifies the milk before it is cut into curd and whey, and says she hopes to someday make her own cultures. The talk ends on salt, with David noting that his chocolate and salted caramel ice creams both contain it. The conversation continues in Part 3.

https://www.jupitermoonicecream.com/