A Guide to Creating Your Own Coolhausian Flavors

Once you become a practiced hand with our recipes, you can make your own flavors. Here are some tips on how to choose your own adventure.

Know Your Palate

Do you prefer sweet or savory? What are some of your favorite flavor combinations? Your choices should feature those elements. For example, Freya’s palate sits on the savory end of the scale, so she enjoys a salty aspect to balance the sweetness in her favorite ice creams.

Keep Your Eyes, Ears, and Mouth Open

We’re always finding inspiration at restaurants, whether from groundbreaking modernist chefs like Chicago’s Grant Achatz or at an everyday meal. When we are dining at our favorite restaurants and we taste a dish with an amazing flavor combination, we begin to ask ourselves, how can we make this into an ice cream? While eating at a sushi bar, for example, we thought about the ginger and wasabi on our plates and their spicy/cool profiles. We thought about ginger snaps sandwiching wasabi ice cream. Then we took it a step further—what if that wasabi ice cream had a chocolate base? Voilà, a new Coolhaus sandwich was born.

Think of the Drink

A lot of our flavors are inspired by cocktails. Well-made cocktails have terrific flavor profiles. Think of your ice cream as a handcrafted cocktail and translate accordingly. Liquor, wine, and beer are good pairing components.

Go to Your Happy Place

Things that put smiles on our faces: a catchy song, a brightly colored painting, a smoking barbecue, landscape design. Some of our favorite creations: Santigold Strawberry Ice Cream, Blood Orange & Cranberry Gelato, Chocolate Chipotle Barbecue Ice Cream, and Highlime Pie Ice Cream Sandwiches.

Release Your Inner Child

Send your soul back to a simpler time. What were some of your favorite childhood indulgences? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? S’mores? Whipped pineapple drinks at Disneyland? Sugary cereals? All great ice cream material.

Consider Celebrations

The sweet potato marshmallow casserole is an ever-present side dish at our family Thanksgivings. We also look forward to some rum-laced eggnog at Christmas and will belly up to the bar for a pint of Guinness and some salty pretzels on St. Patrick’s Day. Who says you can’t prolong these holidays on the dessert plate?

Finally, Follow These Rules of Thumb

We have very few hard-and-fast rules in our ice cream making, but we find that these guidelines help.

If there’s a salty or savory component in an ice cream, always counter it with some sweet. Peking Duck ice cream on its own? Not so much. But add some plum sauce and now we’re talking!
Sometimes every element of an inspirational dish doesn’t need to be included in a flavor. Our Balsamic Fig Mascarpone flavor was inspired by a cheese plate we made, which included some arugula. The flavor finally came together when we dropped the arugula.
While we’re on the topic of cheese, stick to the mellow, young side of the spectrum, since stinky, aged cheeses tend to overwhelm. One of our biggest failures was a Waldorf salad ice cream, because of the blue cheese.
Which brings us to the most important tenet: If it doesn’t sound appetizing as an ice cream, it probably isn’t. Know when to move on.

Once you’ve hit inspiration, play with it and test the hell out of it. Have tasting parties. And when you’re successful, don’t forget to name it—for us, that’s half the fun. But most important, dig in and enjoy!

Share your fantasy flavors with us at: Natasha@eatcoolhaus.com.

Where to Find Coolhaus Ice Cream Sandwiches

Online and Retail

Order treats from our online store for direct delivery right to your door at eatcoolhaus.com/store.

Check your local gourmet grocer or natural foods store. Retailers include Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Fresh Direct, to name a few.

Trucks

For daily menus and up-to-the-minute details on truck locations, check out our local feeds.

Austin: @CoolhausATX

Dallas: @CoolhausDFW

Los Angeles: @CoolhausLA

New York City: @CoolhausNY

SHOPS

Old Town Pasadena

59 E. Colorado Blvd.

Pasadena, CA 91105

626.486.2700

Culver City Arts District

8588 Washington Blvd.

Culver City, CA 90232

310.424.5559

CONNECT

Keep up to date with the Coolhaus crew, learn about new sandwiches and events, and don’t forget to #gramyoursam!

Newsletter sign-up: eatcoolhaus.com/popups/newslettersignup

Instagram: instagram.com/coolhaus

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Coolhaus

Twitter: twitter.com/COOLHAUS

Natasha and Freya would like to thank our friends and family for preliminary and caring caution on our Coolhaus journey and the utter, unwavering support once we launched and began to grow. Barbara and Geoff Case, for their pride and support of our unexpected career journey; Sarah Case, who will one day bring Coolhaus to France, along with all of the love and support of the Case and Dourmashkin extended family, including Caitlin Dourmashkin and Galen Summer, for their New York City hospitality, and Camille Dourmashkin, for her summertime scooping, and the Feldmans and our grandparents. Susana Reyes, for allowing us to test our original recipes in her kitchen and park our original truck in her driveway and for all the love and support through the years. Shannon, Jaimee, and Carissa Estreller, for their official and unofficial work at Coolhaus, along with all the titas. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jeff Hassay, who have gone with us to every Coachella since our launch, for listening to Coolhaus banters and hosting unofficial Farchitecture idea labs. Ari Heckman and Ethan Feirstein, who have been involved bicoastally at Coolhaus and hosted the first office site of our New York City launch. We look forward to saying “hello” to new business with you. Ronna Reed, for her incredible enthusiasm, energy, and knowledge, and her daughter, Justine Jones, for the culinary inspiration, and medium and little Morgan Jones for appearing in the background of Google hangouts now and again. Amber Hawkes and Daniel Lehrer-Graiwer, for their unwavering friendship; Erica Schwarzberg, for her official and unofficial Coolhaus P.R.; Carrie Foster, for concept design work; and Jen Leary, for magnetic fabric work. Rebecca Rudolph, Cathy Johnson, and Gitta Brema of Design, Bitches, for architectural and brand work. Peter Christensen, for his friendship and support and for making us laugh. The original Coachella gang, Patrick Maple, Sean Simbro, Kristen Gordon, Sophie Holt, and Alyssa Pitman. Amy Melin, for being the very first recipe tester; Katrina Mosher, for sending a link that inspired our edible wrappers; and Rhoi Carpena, for his support at Walt Disney Imagineering. The Stern-McCullaugh family, for their support at Coolhaus. All of our clients, customers, and fans. The generous and supportive food-writing world, for all the P.R. over the years. Katherine Latshaw and Frank Weimann, for believing in us, and Rux Martin and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for taking it to fruition. Family friends who have been inspirational in their respective creative fields: Brian Leatart, for a magical photography shoot; we look forward to many more; Penny De Los Santos, for her keen eye and sensibility to our vibe in her photos; our incredibly devoted, passionate, creative, and hardworking staff. Dan and Ashlee Fishman and Bobby Margolis, for the incredible partnership and mentoring. Kathleen Squires—we could not possibly have had more fun and found someone who really “got it” in terms of what we were going for with this book. Thank you for being a crusader with us on this project. It was the experience of a lifetime to author this book with you!

Kathleen would like to thank helpers, tasters, guinea pigs, giant supporters: John R. Squires, Catherine Squires, Christine Squires, Steven Pashkoff, Mary Lou Squires, John A. Squires, super-tester Elizabeth Squires, super-taster William Squires, my part-time dog, Riggins, Edna Laura Perez, Miguel Juan Rodriguez-Marxuach, Miguel J. Rodriguez-Perez, Laura E. Rodriguez-Perez, Ana Teresa Rodriguez-Perez, Canela Rodriguez-Perez, and Liam Rodriguez-Perez. My favorite writer comrades, Andrea Strong and Julie Besonen, for their well of friendship; testers, friends, great chefs Becky Morrison and Julie Carrion; tester/helper Becky McGuigan at The Kitchen at Billings Forge; über-tester, critiquer, Google-chatter, and team Coolhaus mascot Ronna Reed; genius pastry chef David Baker; photography masterminds Brian Leatart and Penny De Los Santos; fan club president, ice cream eater, cookie monster, and unwavering fountain of love Hernan “Ronnie” Rodriguez; awesome agents Katherine Latshaw and Frank Weimann of the Literary Group International; extraordinary editor Rux Martin and the entire team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Most especially, the brilliant brand builders and coolest collaborators ever Natasha Case and Freya Estreller—I wish I could write every book with the two of you.

Natasha Case (left) is a Los Angeles native. She attended UC Berkeley for undergraduate studies, where she majored in architecture and double minored in city and regional planning and Italian studies. Natasha furthered these studies at UCLA, where she pursued a master of architecture and, after graduating, worked as an architectural intern at Walt Disney Imagineering in hotel and master planning. During this time, she started baking cookies and making ice cream and naming the ice cream sandwich combinations after famous architects and architectural movements. She handed them out to her peers, who found them to be tasty comic relief in spite of recent layoffs and discussion of further impending cutbacks. She had also just met Freya, who was helping her make the product behind the scenes and was putting numbers to the concept as a business model. Natasha works today as the CEO of Coolhaus, creating new product opportunities, building new relationships, and innovating ideas that keep Coolhaus on top of its game as zealous expansion continues.

Freya Estreller (right) is cofounder and co-owner of Coolhaus. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, and has a BA in sociology with a minor in business from Cornell University. Prior to founding Coolhaus, she worked in real estate development, design, and finance, helping to build and/or renovate more than three hundred housing units on the East and West Coasts. She currently splits her time between Los Angeles, New York City, and Austin (where all the trucks are!), has a mini schnauzer named Hamilton, whom she fiercely loves, and is thankful every day for getting to live her entrepreneurial dream.

Kathleen Squires is a food writing veteran whose work has spanned book, blog, newsprint, and magazine. Her work has appeared in Saveur, the Wall Street Journal,Cooking Light, Zagat.com, Gourmet, New York magazine,National Geographic Traveler,Real Simple,Budget Travel,Time Out New York, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Observer,Metro,Paper, and many other publications. She lives in New York City.