Fair Food Philly Workshop: Weckerly’s Ice Cream
Curious about the magic behind homemade ice cream, guests arrived after hours to Reading Terminal Market on Thursday, June 19 to learn from the pros. Husband and wife team Andy and Jen Satinsky, the founders and owners of Weckerly’s Ice Cream, welcomed us to the Rick Nichols room, and promised to share a few of their tasty secrets.
Weckerly’s is a small-scale ice cream company born out of Jen’s work as a pastry chef at the White Dog Café, although her relationship with ice cream started off rocky. “The first time I made ice cream, I burned the crap out of it,” she laughed.
With some experience, however, Jen fell in love with the medium of ice cream. She explained that ice cream is a great way to showcase the essence of an ingredient. It’s forgiving and allows for lots of experimentation. The couple shared how they enjoy the challenge of coming up with new flavors and finding ways to perfectly pair and complement different, often unconventional, tastes harmoniously.
Jen and Andy focus on French style ice cream, which starts with an egg-based custard foundation. “American” (aka Philadelphia) style ice cream and Gelato do not contain eggs. Weckerly’s also has a line of sorbets that are a non-dairy option.
The key to ice cream, it seems from all of Jen and Andy’s careful instruction, is all about ratios. The main ingredients in any ice cream are milk, cream, sugar and, for French style, egg yolks. Balancing these elements is how you achieve the proper creamy, silky texture of ice cream.
Fat content creates smoothness, but too much fat will prevent your ice cream from freezing. Nonfat milk solids like natural sugars and proteins lend to the texture of ice cream, but too much and your ice cream will turn out soggy. Sugar affects the freezing temperature – too little and your ice cream will be icy; too much and it won’t freeze.
Finding the perfect combination is more clinical than one might think. Andy mentions that he has a spreadsheet with formulas for calculating the proper ratio of all elements depending on different add-ins like fruit or other flavors. He also passes around the tome of ice cream making – a cookbook titled simply Ice Cream. He points out the most valuable pages where there are long tables with ratios of the main ingredients for different types of ice cream.
Jen gets to work preparing a basic ice cream base. It begins with a process called “scalding” the cream. This means gently bringing the dairy products to a light simmer. She enthusiastically warns against heating too quickly or boiling, “It will boil over and it will go everywhere!” Jen says. Sounds like the voice of experience.
While the cream is heating, Jen shares her pastry-chef secrets for separating eggs. A practiced hand, Jen has seven eggs perfectly separated in less than a minute. She shows how to crack the egg and then cradle the yolk in your hand, letting the whites run through your fingers into a bowl. Then she gently tosses the yolk into a second bowl. For ice cream, only the yolks are used. Jen adds a generous portion of cane sugar and sets aside.
We check on the cream – a thin film has formed with tiny bubbles around the edges. Andy explains that the sugars in the milk are gently caramelizing under the heat, creating a thicker texture.
Stage two is tempering the eggs, also called a liaison. The eggs must be added to the warm milk slowly in order to not scramble them. Jen takes a measuring cup of the warm milk and adds it to the eggs, whisking continuously with her other hand. She continues to add warm cream cup by cup until the sugar is dissolved. With the eggs incorporated, she adds the egg-sugar mixture into the pot with the rest of the milk and continues heating, still whisking.
Jen smiles as she observes that this step always yields a pleasant “pudding smell.” Class members line up to take a whiff. “It smells like a latte,” one participant remarks.
This is the prime time to add any sort of infusions to your ice cream – like vanilla, herbs (Jen and Andy recommend rosemary, an unusual choice), or coffee. As the liquid thickens up, it’s ready for the addition of flavor or mix-ins and then will be added to an ice cream machine.
We switch gears to talking about preparing additions to our ice cream base. Jen and Andy show us how they prepare a goat’s milk cajeta. Cajeta is a caramel-like syrup that hails from Latin America. Andy loves the way the sweetness of the cajeta plays with the grassy, earthy flavors of the goat’s milk. The cajeta consists of a combination of goat’s milk, baking soda and vanilla. It is cooked down into a dark caramel brown syrupy texture, but not as thick or creamy as traditional caramel.
As a vat of cajeta makes it’s way around, I take a taste. It is sweet but also has a lightness in the place of caramel’s rich buttery flavor. The tartness of goat’s milk also comes through, adding a sharper surprise to the sweet syrup.
Beyond their mastery of technique, Weckerly’s prides itself on using only the freshest, locally sourced and Fair Trade ingredients. They truly epitomize the spirit of the Fair Food member business. While Jen shows us how to split a vanilla bean for the cajeta, Andy explains how they source their vanilla beans from a Fair Trade provider out of Papua New Guinea.
It’s clear from the way Andy talks about the treatment of workers that supporting upstanding businesses is a cornerstone of Weckerly’s operation. The couple also has positive relationships with many local farms where they purchase dairy products, fruit and other ingredients.
As the cajeta continues to cook down, we turn to another popular addition to ice cream – fruit. In order to get a strong enough flavor for ice cream, fruit needs to be highly concentrated, which means cooking it. Andy encourages us to play around with different ways of concentrating fruit though. Jen mentions that for their strawberry ice cream Weckerly’s roasts their strawberries in the oven rather than cooking them on the stovetop. Roasting maximizes the fresh local flavors of the strawberry, she says. On the stove you kind of just get a syrupy sweetness.
For many fruits, the couple says that making a fruit butter is the way to go. Like apple butter that is frequently seen in farmers markets and grocery stores in the fall, any fruit can be made into a “butter” consistency. It’s basically just the step beyond jam. This concoction can then be added to ice cream as a nice swirl.
Jen brought rhubarb to show us how to take advantage of this seasonal vegetable. True to her pastry chef training, Jen chops some stalks of rhubarb in perfectly identical chunks. She tells us that to temper the tartness of rhubarb, it’s best to coat the chunks in sugar and macerate overnight.
The next day, the process is simple – just cook it. And keep cooking until the texture becomes a thick fruit spread. The cooking process for Weckerly’s rhubarb butter takes about four hours!
As the rhubarb cooks down, we get the chance to sample some of Weckerly’s sweet treats. Andy unpacks cute mini ice cream sandwiches.
The first is roasted strawberry ice cream on pound cake. The ice cream is creamy and fresh. You can taste the roasted quality of the strawberries, which like Jen explained earlier preserves the integrity of the flavor.
Next up is cajeta ice cream and oatmeal cookie sandwich. The cajeta has the same flavor as the finished cajeta we sampled earlier, but enhanced by the creaminess of the ice cream. The sweet cajeta is perfectly complimented by the slightly salty oatmeal cookie.
Finally Andy passes around a spicy chocolate cajeta ice cream on graham cracker sandwich. One of their more complicated flavors, the ice cream starts out sweet with the chocolate and cajeta flavors, but finishes with a spicy tickle in the back of your throat. Truly a masterful mixture of flavors.
As we prepared to leave, one student asked the question that many of us had been curious about from the beginning, where did the name Weckerly come from? Jen and Andy’s last name is Satinsky. With a sly smile, Jen tells us that Weckerly is her maiden name. Andy laughs, he said when they got married Jen became Mrs. Satinsky but when they started this business he became Mr. Weckerly.
The duo plans on continuing to grow and expand their Weckerly’s. This summer is only their second season of business. Weckerly’s is based out of the Green Line Café, which has two locations just a few blocks west of Penn’s campus. Weckerly’s also scoops at Clark Park on Saturdays during the farmers market and at various markets and events across the city.
– Audrey Harnagel