Ellery Bryan, 10, a fifth-grader from Winchester, enters the store with Vicky Bryan, her aunt from Jacksonville, Fla. They buy a mint chocolate-chip cone and a Tastykake Peanut Butter Kandy Kake before agreeing to try some extreme ice cream. "It's too exotic for words," says Bryan, tasting the bacon-flavored kind. Ellery thinks it's "really good!"
"Too weird" is her aunt's judgment on the barbecue flavor, but the pair agree the Cackalacky is "almost like cinnamonish." They like it.
"You should try making a nachos ice cream," Ellery suggests.
"Nachos!" Hearn says.
The cold hard fact is that the ingredients must get along -- and that's not always easy. Hearn often consults with the experts at the Penn State Agriculture Department's ice cream school. "If it doesn't work, it separates, it could freeze, it could be nasty," Hearn says. "We tried to do crab-meat ice cream a million different ways and couldn't make it."
When he called Penn State about making barbecue ice cream, he was instructed to triple the vanilla to offset other ingredients in the sauce. "So the barbecue was just pouring a half-gallon of it into the mix, putting a whole mess of high-end vanilla in there, and the fats of the sauce bonded with the fats of the ice cream," he says.
When Hearn mentions that the ice cream professors once told him that pork rind would make a perfect ice cream, Skelton shouts, "That'd be great!"
But Hearn didn't make it. "I'm not going to do pork rind," he says. "This is Delaware. If we were down South somewhere, you know, maybe."
* * *
Pushing the envelope of flavor fusion is the biggest and boldest trend in the ice cream biz right now, with ice cream makers such as Cold Stone Creamery making anything-but-vanilla flavors such as wasabi ginger and black licorice.
The question is, how edgy can you get and still taste good?
Two months ago, Hearn came up with a pear/green tea flavor that's been a big hit -- though he "hates it," he says.
