OUR STORY
BACK TO THE BASICS, BACK TO THE KITCHEN
Since our first pair of buttery yellow trucks, lovingly dubbed the Eagle and the Bobcat, hit the streets of New York in 2008, Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream has become a symbol for the revitalization of the American ice cream truck, a return to traditional ice cream making, and the celebration of responsibly sourced natural ingredients from the finest small producers in the world. A lot of hard work and many cheerful days—and nights—of trial and error have gotten us to where we are today, but it all began with the simple idea of bringing ice cream back to the basics. Real ingredients, rich, classic flavors—and little more.
When we set out in our ice cream truck for the first time in June 2008, headed to Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, we had the dream of selling ice cream—but not just any ice cream. The ice cream we wanted to sell could be made with basic pantry ingredients, without any stabilizers, thickeners, or emulsifiers added to enhance the ice cream’s texture and mouthfeel. We were hoping to build a sustainable, environmentally conscious business that would allow us to sell our ice cream for a living, establish meaningful relationships with amazing purveyors, and run a socially conscious company where we paid people fair wages and could offer them benefits.
We were so grateful and delighted by such a warm reception from the community as well as the media. On that very first day, we were approached by a Whole Foods buyer about getting our ice cream into their New York stores! The coverage we received from the New York Times, New York magazine, Gothamist, and other local press was also generous and kind.
We knew our ice cream was different—that our dedication to quality, simplicity, and taste was distinct—and we knew that ice cream is the evergreen popular treat. We had no idea that the reaction would be as immediate and as positive as it was. Our business has grown rapidly, and today includes trucks and stores in both New York City and Los Angeles, sales to tristate-area grocery stores, and plans to expand to other markets.
It turns out our quest for an old-fashioned ice cream coincided with a cultural shift: people returning to their kitchens to put up their own preserves and pickles, make cheese and bread, and churn their own small-batch ice cream. When we started thinking about writing a book, we wanted to share our knowledge with like-minded readers—the ones who eschew additives in their ice cream (and other food) and want to make it the way their grandmother might have.
We want this to be a fresh chance to get back to the basics, and to get you, our readers, back in the kitchen, armed with the techniques, recipes, principles, and stories that have sculpted our flavors. Most of all, we want you to make and savor delicious ice cream for years to come, and to understand ice cream making well enough to create your own favorite flavors.
AN IDEA BORN
Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream made its auspicious start as the result of an ad-inspired whim of a summer job: “Make $1k a week running your own business!”
Home for the summer from his first year of college, Ben Van Leeuwen answered the call and, before long, was piloting a Good Humor truck through the streets of Riverside, Connecticut, with his brother Pete.
They found the work fun and loved interacting with people, but over the next few summers, as they returned to the trucks, they began to question the very product they were serving. Like most of the ice cream you can find outside of upscale restaurants, especially ice cream from trucks, it was packed with artificial ingredients. Ever read the back of the ice cream carton? Among the usual ice cream ingredients, you will find emulsifiers, fillers, and stabilizers like xanthan gum, a thickener engineered to boost body, texture, and shelf life. It was a few years before I’d meet up with Ben and Pete, and together, we’d hatch our plan to bring quality ice cream to the masses first with trucks and then with bona fide brick-and-mortar shops.
Ice cream makers, in the absence of rich, quality ingredients like egg yolks and smaller amounts of heavy cream, pack their ice cream with stabilizers to make it resemble the kind of ice cream your grandmother might have made. It lowers costs and increases the profit margin for the producer but, as a result, the consumers are dealt an inferior product. What you’re eating, essentially, isn’t your grandmother’s ice cream but a confectionary product strategically engineered to lower costs and boost profit. Certainly, better ice cream can be made with just the basics found in your pantry and refrigerator!
Ben and Pete were food lovers from childhood and grew up in a household that emphasized whole foods and cooking at home. While their parents didn’t fetishize food, there were always hearty, comforting meals in the house: Transylvanian goulash with tender pork braised with homemade sauerkraut and paprika; cream and turkey crepes; pan-fried flounder; chicken cacciatore; split pea soup with ham; and lentil soup generously studded with carrots. The dishes were lovingly prepared by their mother, who had picked up good home cooking from her own mother, who, in turn, had learned to cook from her aunt, who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to Portland, Oregon, and worked as a private chef for wealthy families in town.
Food was such a strong presence in their childhood experiences that the first recorded word to have rolled off Pete’s tongue was “cookie,” delivered in the form of a howl, as he lunged from his mother’s arms toward the treat he wanted.
Childhood dishes stayed with Ben and made a powerful imprint on his palate and how he perceived food. He never took to soda or the saccharine-sweet ice cream sold off trucks. The habits he formed as a child rose to the surface while he was driving his Good Humor truck, and as he handed out ice cream that he himself didn’t enjoy, he started to envision a better version of it.
Why not, he began to wonder, make ice cream the old-fashioned way? And what better way to get it to the people than to load it up on a truck and bring it to them?
For my part, I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, on the other side of the globe, in a house with a vegan mother and sister. For most of my childhood and teenage years, I ate a mostly vegetarian diet. There was always lots of good, real food in the house: bread from the local bakery, meat from our butcher (that my father and brother looked forward to eating), in-season vegetables from our greengrocer, and lots and lots of fruit. I remember preferring a savory breakfast to a sweet one—I never had much of a sweet tooth—eating things like Vegemite, tomato, or avocado on toast. That said, I definitely had my share of Slurpees on hot days after school. Meat appeared infrequently in our home—Dad was only allowed to cook it outside on the grill—but vegetable soups, curries, salads, and pasta were ever present.
In the winter of 2006, I went on vacation to visit my brother in London, and one night, while at a live music bar in Camden, I met Ben, who was spending a semester of his senior year in London. I’d been feeling restless about my job and direction in life—I had a feeling I was ready for a change, but I couldn’t put my finger on what change that would be.
Ben and I struck up a conversation and realized we had a great deal in common. We saw each other for a few days before I returned to Australia, and then Ben came to visit me there during his spring break, and then again later in the year. On his second visit, Ben suggested that I move to New York (and find that change I’d been seeking), and I thought to myself, Why not? What do I have to lose?
Back at home, I was at a crossroads: I had been working in event production for three years, and while I didn’t hate my job, I wasn’t exactly leaping out of bed in the morning. I had never been to New York, but something about making that leap felt right to me.
In the Australian summer of 2006, a few months before I moved to the United States, Ben called me with an idea: “I think we should start our own ice cream truck business when you get here.” He had told me about his and Pete’s Good Humor truck experience and that he had been thinking about going into business to make better ice cream.
{Jeffrey Furticella}
Ben was aware that while New York didn’t face a shortage of ice cream trucks, none were serving anything that was as simple as what came from a home pantry. The ice cream truck idea sounded a little crazy to me, but given the fact that I had no solid work plans upon arrival, I was excited by the prospect of a totally new venture.
And that is how Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream was born: Ben, Pete, and me plunging, headfirst, into the world of small-batch ice cream making. With Ben fresh out of college, and me fresh off the boat, we moved into Pete’s apartment in Greenpoint, brimming with hope that we were going to create something amazing. It helped that we didn’t overanalyze the situation and the obstacles ahead, or else we might have gotten too scared to start our ice cream endeavor.
In hindsight, taking such a leap was both a crazy and prudent move on our part—great risks require great leaps, and if we had suddenly gotten too risk averse and practical . . . who knows? We might have never tried to get the business off the ground, or we might not have listened to our gut. None of us had formal culinary training, but we had all been keen home cooks for many years and were driven to make this work.
The idea was simple: Let’s serve delicious, real ice cream out of beautiful trucks, and let’s get back to a time when ice cream was made with whole ingredients, not filled with additives. Of course, we had to learn a lot more to bring this idea to reality, and we needed funding! The truck model was perfect for us; it eliminated much of the overhead faced by a start-up brick-and-mortar place, and offered more flexibility for trial and error. While the ice cream truck wasn’t a new idea, it was one that was in dire need of reinvention.
One afternoon, Ben and I sat down and began to put together a scrappy document that, in time, grew to become our business plan. We outlined America’s obsession with ice cream, the void in the city of something truly great, our ideals of quality, and ideas for design and marketing. We even noted that, as an affordable luxury and a comfort food, ice cream is recession-proof. And by the time we launched, right as the 2008 recession started to hit, we got to prove that point.
We sent our business plan to everyone who might have the means to invest: family, friends, college professors, and so on. Our goal was to raise about a hundred thousand dollars to cover retrofitting the trucks and the first production run. Surprisingly, the wealthy folks we knew weren’t the ones who got on board; most of our investments trickled in a few thousand dollars at a time from friends who were excited about our plans and believed in our idea. We ended up raising around seventy thousand dollars and then took out a line of credit for another twenty-five thousand. The idea was that we could start with what we had while the three of us held down a gaggle of jobs to support ourselves.
At the same time we were fund-raising, we were experimenting with ice cream in our home kitchen. We’d make batches of ice cream, and then invite our friends over to get feedback on the results. We’d feed them ten batches of the same flavor, solicit feedback and comments on every sample, and zero in on what worked and what didn’t. While the idea of eating ice cream sounds appealing, taste-testing ten batches at a time was arduous.
Pretty early in our research we learned that almost all ice creams sold in supermarkets had what are known as stabilizers. Stabilizers, both natural and artificial, help the ice cream have a creamy mouthfeel without actually being high in egg yolks or butterfat. In many cases, adding stabilizers is a way to lower costs and boost profits.
In a move that seemed downright anti-profit, we decided to make our ice cream the old-fashioned way. If it didn’t come from our pantry, it didn’t belong in our ice cream. We wanted our ice cream to be dead simple: fresh whole milk, heavy cream, egg yolks, and cane sugar (but not too much).
And the best part of all was that we were succeeding. The ice cream we were making in our small-batch home ice cream maker was rich, creamy, and delicious—no stabilizers needed!
GREENPOINT
During the summer of 2008, you couldn’t go two blocks in Brooklyn without hearing that staple of the American summer soundtrack: the siren song of passing ice cream trucks. The new wave of the food truck movement, which wouldn’t sweep the country for a few more years, was in its early stages. A handful of brave souls were starting to put out high-quality food from trucks, but where ice cream was concerned, the streets still belonged to Mister Softee and Good Humor.
We had a steep hill to climb and a lot to learn about starting a business. We had to learn how to make the ice cream itself; find ways to scale the amounts; procure and furnish our trucks; and raise enough money to do all of those things, and then some! We were driven, sharing diverse skill sets and a vision that seemed just simple enough to work. Once our business plan was hammered out, we began to navigate the labyrinthine system of money and permits, all while juggling multiple jobs to pay rent. For a while I was working at an art gallery in Portchester, at a small Brooklyn record label, and at a film festival. Pete worked as an art handler and also as a brand manager for a vodka company, while still finding the time to play in two bands. And, for a little while, Ben had a desk job and then worked as a server at Michelin-starred Dressler, a sadly now shuttered Williamsburg, Brooklyn, restaurant.
When we had any spare time, we’d pile into the kitchen to experiment; with each new batch and flavor, we had a feeling we were onto something special. We quickly learned that, when it came to making great, wholesome ice cream, simplicity was king. It all began with perfect custard, which consisted of nothing more than farm-fresh, hormone-free milk and cream, egg yolks, and cane sugar. In order to achieve the right consistency the traditional way, we had to make sure we were achieving an ultra-high butterfat custard—generally around 22 percent—adjusted to the contours of each recipe. This made for a rich, sturdy base, the perfect canvas for exploring flavors, which allowed us to avoid thickeners and emulsifiers. Ben, being a spreadsheet lover, created spreadsheets with built-in formulas for ingredient amounts and fat percentages.
At the same time, we scaled way back on the sugar content to let the individual flavors really pop. We learned that most producers were loading their ice cream with sweeteners to create a sticky, generic flavor that overwhelmed the palate. We, however, were after ice cream where you could actually taste the flavor and that would taste as it should. Pistachio ice cream would taste of pistachios, chocolate of chocolate, and so on.
We also noticed that the more of sweet flavor you ate, the more it intensified on your palate. Nina Planck once wrote, quoting her mother, “If you taste sugar on the first bite, it will be cloying by the last.” If you start eating ice cream and it tastes noticeably sweet on the first bite, by the time you are done, what had started out as pleasant will most likely have become overwhelmingly sweet, and that thickness and stickiness will linger unpleasantly on your palate long after you’ve finished eating.
We researched extensively and obsessively, asking a community of friends, chefs, and food lovers in Brooklyn for advice on ingredients; trying all sorts of nuts, vanilla, coffee, and chocolate—and we started digging up some fascinating stuff. We wanted the flavor ingredients to match the quality of our base, so we searched high and low to find quality producers that shared our ideals. Wherever we could, we engaged with our local community for the best possible ingredients, but we also wanted to source the best ingredients we’d tasted in our travels worldwide. In the end, we sourced the best we could find—in some cases the ingredients were local and in others, global.
We found astonishingly good pistachios that grow near the slopes of Mount Etna in Bronte, Sicily, which are harvested only once every two years, so the trees can save up their energy and deliver a remarkable harvest each time. We’ve tried a lot of pistachios and these are, by far, the best we’ve found. They are also certified by the Slow Food Institute of Italy.
We discovered exquisite chocolate from France made by chocolatier Michel Cluizel. The company sources beans from eight plantations around the world and makes fine chocolate without any soy lecithin or processing of the beans with alkali.
We also found exceptional local, as well as global, ingredients: tart red currants from the Hudson Valley and chocolate chips for our Mint Chip Ice Cream made by the wonderful folks at Askinosie in Missouri.
As our arsenal of ingredients expanded, we grew more excited about the idea of using our ice cream to celebrate the best small producers and most dynamic ingredients in the world. We wanted to tell the stories of the fascinating flavors we were finding, and to educate our patrons about fine ingredients and the value of responsible sourcing.
Our goal and our point of difference were becoming clear. We were making simple, delicious ice cream, with no shortcuts or odd-sounding ingredients. Ice cream that celebrated ingredients perfected by nature, not modern chemistry.
THE FINAL STRETCH
We experimented day and night in our tiny kitchen, and emerged with some surprising flavors. Our initial attempt to come up with a Dark ’n’ Stormy ice cream proved unsatisfactory, since working with alcohol in ice cream can be a tricky thing. But we discovered that just the ginger alone made for an incredible flavor that shined, and that’s how the Ginger Ice Cream was born—the result of a happy accident. As we found new, exciting flavors to share, and continued to tweak our ice cream base, we still had a few more important hurdles to overcome.
First and foremost, we needed somewhere to produce our ice cream on a larger scale, to serve more customers; and second, we needed trucks from which to sell it.
As we tried to find a producer, we were met with a surprising amount of resistance: Nobody, it seemed, wanted to make ice cream our way. It was “too impractical,” we were told, “too inefficient.” But we persisted, and after some searching, we ended up finding a dairy in upstate New York (about six hours from Brooklyn) that was making ice cream for a few brands. We went to them, our recipes in hand, and asked, “How can we make these ice cream flavors on a large scale and get them to New York to sell?”
They took one look at our recipe and said, “Well, first you’ll need some stabilizers, milk powder, and so on.”
“But why?” we insisted. “We’ve been making these recipes at home and they are amazing, no stabilizers or fillers needed.”
No one had an answer for us, except, apparently, that’s what everyone was doing. Unsatisfied with that answer, we insisted on using only the ingredients we used in our home batch testing. The way we saw it, if we could make ice cream this good at home, why couldn’t we make it for everyone? We worked together with the dairy to adapt the recipes for their equipment but still without using any stabilizers. And the results were amazing!
For the first two and a half years, all our ice cream was made upstate using our recipes, local dairy supplies, and the special flavors we would source and ship in.
Fortunately, our commitment to using only the best, natural ingredients paid off. Before too long, we were splitting our time between a small dairy in upstate New York and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. One day we’d hand-grate a bushel of nutmeg, the next we’d try to figure out how to steep fifty-pound bags of Earl Grey tea. (The solution, as we learned from our friend and local brewer Dan Suarez, was to use giant bags designed for hops!)
The rest of our time was spent in a littered yard under a bridge in Queens, where a guy named Patrick had agreed to retrofit a pair of decommissioned postal trucks we’d found on eBay. Patrick’s was a pretty bare-bones operation: no contracts, no e-mails, and no design. Basically, he custom-cut holes in the truck and figured out how to fit the stuff, like freezers and such, inside. We wanted the trucks to have an old-time elegance and a classic look that would continue to look fresh as time went on. With experience in event production, I led the charge on the design front. I asked Patrick to put in large, open windows perfect for letting in lots of breeze and sunshine—and found our buttery yellow paint color in a vintage General Motors catalog. To create our now signature Victorian-influenced botanical illustrations for each of our flavors we worked with a local artist, Elara Tanguy. Finally, we threw on some chrome bumpers, and the Eagle and the Bobcat—two beautiful, creamy-yellow, airy trucks—conveyed the whimsical, nostalgic fun of eating ice cream!
By the spring of 2008, we were ready to test the waters. While waiting for our permits to clear in New York, we ran the trucks out in Connecticut, where Ben and Pete had grown up, for a month. That practice run turned out to be a great way to iron out the kinks: to figure out scooping temperatures, decide on equitable pricing, and realize we needed things like counters underneath our windows.
Before we knew it, summer had arrived, our permits came through, and it was finally time to take our ice cream to the streets. We kicked things off by throwing a big tasting party for all the friends who’d helped us along the way. We got everyone to vote for their favorite varieties, and narrowed the list down to ten flavors: vanilla, chocolate, mint chip, gianduja, pistachio, hazelnut, strawberry, currants and cream, ginger, and espresso. We wanted to do the classic flavors really well and to celebrate singular, quality ingredients.
Our very first day out in a truck was June 21, 2008, in Battery Park—there was a street fair. By some strange twist of fate, our coauthor, Olga, happened to be there, purely by chance. She spotted the yellow truck and immediately made a beeline for some ginger ice cream. She says she distinctly remembers that moment because she had never heard of our ice cream, and immediately fell in love with its taste. Years before we ever sat down to talk about working on a book together, she had become a Van Leeuwen ice cream devotee, stopping by our Bergen Street location at least twice a week.
A few days later, we set out for SoHo, on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets (now our iconic spot), exhausted and excited to start our ice cream journey. We thought it might be a calm way to test the waters—we didn’t expect to see customers line up to taste our ice cream.
That first summer it was just the three of us, plus our friend Dan and two girls, Kristin and Sophie, whom we hired to help scoop on the weekends. Some days, we’d have the trucks out from ten a.m. to one a.m.; it was grueling and demanding, but we were receiving such an enthusiastic response and we were happy and proud to see our idea take root. We worked for months on end without taking a single day off. We were tired, but we were so happy. Because we were so busy, summer just flew by and before we knew it, we were heading into fall.
By the end of that first summer, we had added a third truck, the Rattlesnake, and were gearing up for a nice long winter break. In this next generation of trucks, we wanted to add something that would allow us to be out and about all year round. To buttress weaker ice cream sales in the colder months, we introduced coffee and pastries.
Because we didn’t want these to seem like an afterthought, we were deeply committed to making quality, delicious baked goods. Everything had to meet the Van Leeuwen standards—every detail mattered. To make coffee, we purchased two beautiful Mirage Veloce espresso machines from the Netherlands—if you have ever seen these machines (or made coffee with them), you know they are works of art in every sense of the word. We trained our baristas to make high-quality espresso drinks with microfoam milk; we used the same quality ingredients in our pastries as we did in our ice cream. While our coffee business in the winter didn’t do as well as the ice cream business did in the summer, it was enough to keep us afloat and keep some of our team members employed during the winter months.
In February 2010, we opened our first tiny brick-and-mortar storefront where it had all begun—in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We loved the truck business, but we were ready for expansion. The trucks were not without challenges. A storefront, for example, couldn’t break down, or get a flat tire. And we were looking forward to offering our customers a space to experience, not just ice cream.
In the following year, we added three more trucks: Kangaroo, Panda, and Turtle, the latter one arriving after we secured a permit to sell at Central Park’s Tavern on the Green. We also added two more storefronts: one in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill and one in the East Village.
{Joanna Trimble}
One of the challenges in making our ice cream upstate was that we were limited to making only certain flavors. The minimum runs were quite large and the equipment was sparse. We couldn’t roast bananas, for example, or swirl caramel, and these were the types of things we really wanted to have more control over.
So, in 2012, to simplify and streamline our expanding operation, we decided to move our production down to Brooklyn and build our very own little ice cream kitchen. We found an old, shuttered Polish restaurant in Greenpoint and it became the official Van Leeuwen headquarters: home to our ice cream production, bakery, and the very first Van Leeuwen office! We hired our amazingly talented head of production, Jane Nguyen, and Alvaro Flores, an indispensable team member whom we trained from the ground up. From that point on, all our ice cream, including the prepackaged pints that are sold in the tristate area, has been made at our headquarters.
Having an actual office felt exhilarating—we had spent the past four years working off our couches. A physical office allowed us to hire a full-time employee: Kristin Vita, the very first person we hired back in 2008 to work weekends, had always said that if we ever grew big enough, she’d love to quit her day job and come on full-time in an office role.
These days we are streamlining our operations and exhaustively developing new flavors and products. We now have two trucks in Los Angeles, and have signed leases for two Van Leeuwen stores there: one in the Arts District and one in Culver City. Pete has moved to LA to head up our West Coast operation. We are also running a Balinese restaurant, Selamat Pagi (which means “good morning”), in the front space of our headquarters in Greenpoint. Balinese might sound random coming from an Aussie and two Americans, but Ben and I traveled to Bali several times while visiting my family in Australia (it’s a far less expensive trip from there!) and fell in love with its cuisine.
Despite the fact that we are going on our eighth year, we still buzz with the vibrant energy we had at the very beginning, and our approach is still that of a scrappy start-up. We don’t rest on our laurels and don’t take anything for granted. And we keep on pushing forward, trying to make better ice cream, offer more flavors, and continue to source the best possible ingredients.
In early 2014, we introduced seven vegan ice cream flavors: Mint Chip, Pistachio, Coffee, Chocolate, Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip, Salted Caramel, and Roasted Banana. We had been tinkering with the vegan flavors for some time, and after many months of testing, we finally settled on a formula that we were proud to share. We found that making our own cashew milk made all the difference to the final product, and, once again, we avoided using thickeners. And in the late 2014, we signed a lease for a new Van Leeuwen location to open in the West Village sometime in 2015.
By the time you hold this book in your hand, there may be other developments taking place that we haven’t even planned yet. But, no matter the flavors or the locations, you can always count on the very things that propelled Van Leeuwen ice cream into existence. Everything is still made in our headquarters. Our commitment to quality ingredients and delicious ice cream, to our customers, and to our local and international purveyors—whether they provide us with chocolate, pistachios, red currants, or our unique vanilla extract—remains as steadfast as it was when we first started out on those muggy SoHo streets in our buttercup yellow truck. Our business might have grown, but our approach and our commitment to ice cream remain the same.
We hope you love cooking from this book as much as we loved putting it together. We want this to become the kind of stained, dog-eared book that shows years of use and love. We sincerely hope that this becomes your go-to companion for making ice cream, and a timeless reference for years to come.
laura, ben, and pete
