Food The Ice Cream Sandwich Comes o

Food
The Ice Cream Sandwich Comes of Age
APRIL 9, 2015

Ice Cream Sandwiches
CreditAn Rong Xu for The New York Times
The American ice cream sandwich was born in the Bowery district of Manhattan in the early 1900s, when a pushcart vendor slapped together skinny wafers and vanilla ice cream and handed them for a penny each to shoeshiners and stockbrokers alike.
Only the latter are likely to have access to the version now served on the Bowery at the high-minded restaurant Pearl & Ash. Here the sandwich ($6) arrives wrapped in paper with a happy face scrawled on it, belying the adult flavors within: ice cream suffused with Campari, vermouth and juniper (to conjure gin). It is a Negroni, transmuted, and tastes frankly medicinal, unmitigated by the trace of orange (the cocktail’s garnish) in thin bookends of vanilla cake.
The calculus of the first ice cream sandwich was simple: mostly cold and creamy, with a little crunch on either end. But unlike the cone, which functions primarily as a serving vessel, those crunchy ends (originally wafers, later upgraded to cookies and cake) are integral to the whole. They should make the ice cream better than if it stood alone. Not every combination works. Cookies and ice cream that are perfectly delightful on their own can be, once married, a bore.
Photo

A brown sugar molasses ice cream sandwich with layers of exceptionally dark, chewy brownie at Luca & Bosco. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times
How far has the ice cream sandwich come in a century? To find out, I visited a dozen ice cream shops and restaurants that have opened in New York in the last few years. (Note that the season is not quite upon us, and some purveyors are still in hibernation.)
Pearl & Ash’s take may be the most radical in the city, at least in terms of flavor; its appearance, as a dainty, tripartite oblong, is classic. Elsewhere, the usual sweet enclosing layers have been supplanted by bread, an idea imported from abroad and arguably more true to the name sandwich. At A. B. Biagi, a gelato shop with an Old World aura a block west of the Bowery, a brioche as big as a bagel is slit and given a serious schmear of gelato, then half-smashed in a sandwich press ($8). It emerges with a toasted frill; inside, the gelato is soft but still deeply cold, and the change in temperature as you eat is half the pleasure. In Sicily this could be breakfast.
Photo

Triangles of waffle, fresh from the iron, make up the fluffy outer strata of the sandwich at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, a bright parlor a half-block east of the Bowery, makes an open-face sandwich ($12), the base a slice of Japanese shokupan, a pliant white Pullman loaf that evokes Wonder Bread, but with more resilience. It’s saturated with honey and blitzed with a hand torch until gooey at the center and crackly on top, then loaded with two scoops of raw-milk ice cream, astonishingly pure in flavor, and drizzled with more honey. One more torching and the ice cream starts to collapse. The sweet meld exerts an almost gravitational pull: it’s sort of too much, but it keeps dragging you back.
The Thai incarnation of the ice cream sandwich, khanom pang ai tiim, is imposing as served at the restaurant Pok Pok Ny, on the Columbia Street Waterfront in Brooklyn. Four mounds of coconut-jackfruit ice cream line a sweet bun from a Chinese bakery, split at the top to mimic a lobster roll, with a dab underneath of sticky rice cooked down with sugar and pandan-scented coconut cream ($7). The bread is sturdy enough to withstand the slow melt without disintegrating, and shattered peanuts, chocolate syrup and sweetened condensed milk make gratifyingly sloppy trimmings. Alas, the sandwich is too big to pick up and eat; as at Morgenstern’s, utensils are required.
Two ice cream sandwiches come to an order ($5.50) at House of Inasal, a Filipino restaurant in Woodside, Queens. They suggest overgrown sliders in school-spirit colors: regal ube (purple yam) ice cream on golden rolls of baliwag, rich with eggs and milk. Each is adorned with a spackle of ube halaya, mashed purple yam thickened with coconut milk, sweetened condensed milk and a touch of butter; curls of young coconut; and scattered pops of pinipig, unripened glutinous rice that has been pounded and toasted to a state near Rice Krispies. The result is a fine reciprocity of crunch and give, and flavors that incline more toward buttery than sweet.
Triangles of waffle, fresh from the iron, make up the fluffy outer strata of the sandwich ($6 to $7, depending on the kind of waffle) at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream, a minuscule shop in the East Village dominated by a wall of surrealist clocks with gold hands sweeping over celebrity faces (Flava Flav, George Michael). On a recent evening, the waffles were best paired with their time-honored companion, maple syrup, in the form of maple ice cream embedded with walnuts and hunks of maple-walnut pie. (This flavor has gone temporarily off the menu, but it’s worth exploring other options, as well as the occasionally available red velvet waffle.)
More traditionally structured sandwiches ($6) are found at Ice & Vice, which currently operates as a pop-up stand but plans to open a shop on the Lower East Side this summer. Its offerings are open bids for nostalgia, like toasted milk ice cream packed between brownies mosaic-ed in broken Oreos, grinningly sweet. Tipsy Scoop, a catering company and online shop that delivers by messenger ($60 plus delivery fee for the minimum order of a dozen), puts chocolate-chip cookies around alcohol-infused ice cream: coffee mellowed by Frangelico and Patrón tequila-coffee liqueur, and cake vodka perfumed with amaretto and white chocolate liqueur. It’s a drink I’d be embarrassed to order, but as an unabashed dessert, it’s delicious. (The cookies are functional, nothing more.)
One night at OddFellows Ice Cream Co., a shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose roster of flavors includes novelties like edamame and foie gras, the ice cream sandwich ($7) seemed surprisingly conservative: two perforated chocolate wafers around vanilla ice cream. But texture was everything, with a crush of hazelnuts on the outer rim and, lurking in the vanilla, an oozing stripe of caramel.
Some makers of ice cream sandwiches show no interest in innovation, seeking only perfection. My favorite sandwich was the simplest, handed to me (for $4.99) from a stall run by Luca & Bosco in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. The ice cream was brown sugar molasses, with a lovely, almost subliminal bitterness holding the sweetness in check, between blocks of exceptionally dark, chewy brownie. I ate it on a bitter late-winter night, as the wind off the sidewalk found my coat’s every weakness and my fingers went half-numb. By then I’d tasted so many ice cream sandwiches, I feared I’d never look on one again with affection, and still I ate every bite.

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Food The Ice Cream Sandwich Comes of AgeAPRIL 9, 2015 Ice Cream SandwichesCreditAn Rong Xu for The New York Times The American ice cream sandwich was born in the Bowery district of Manhattan in the early 1900s, when a pushcart vendor slapped together skinny wafers and vanilla ice cream and handed them for a penny each to shoeshiners and stockbrokers alike.Only the latter are likely to have access to the version now served on the Bowery at the high-minded restaurant Pearl & Ash. Here the sandwich ($6) arrives wrapped in paper with a happy face scrawled on it, belying the adult flavors within: ice cream suffused with Campari, vermouth and juniper (to conjure gin). It is a Negroni, transmuted, and tastes frankly medicinal, unmitigated by the trace of orange (the cocktail’s garnish) in thin bookends of vanilla cake.The calculus of the first ice cream sandwich was simple: mostly cold and creamy, with a little crunch on either end. But unlike the cone, which functions primarily as a serving vessel, those crunchy ends (originally wafers, later upgraded to cookies and cake) are integral to the whole. They should make the ice cream better than if it stood alone. Not every combination works. Cookies and ice cream that are perfectly delightful on their own can be, once married, a bore.Photo A brown sugar molasses ice cream sandwich with layers of exceptionally dark, chewy brownie at Luca & Bosco. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times How far has the ice cream sandwich come in a century? To find out, I visited a dozen ice cream shops and restaurants that have opened in New York in the last few years. (Note that the season is not quite upon us, and some purveyors are still in hibernation.)Pearl & Ash’s take may be the most radical in the city, at least in terms of flavor; its appearance, as a dainty, tripartite oblong, is classic. Elsewhere, the usual sweet enclosing layers have been supplanted by bread, an idea imported from abroad and arguably more true to the name sandwich. At A. B. Biagi, a gelato shop with an Old World aura a block west of the Bowery, a brioche as big as a bagel is slit and given a serious schmear of gelato, then half-smashed in a sandwich press ($8). It emerges with a toasted frill; inside, the gelato is soft but still deeply cold, and the change in temperature as you eat is half the pleasure. In Sicily this could be breakfast.Photo Triangles of waffle, fresh from the iron, make up the fluffy outer strata of the sandwich at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream. Credit An Rong Xu for The New York Times Morgenstern's terbaik es krim, ruang tamu terang setengah blok Timur Bowery, membuat sandwich membuka-wajah ($12), dasar sepotong shokupan Jepang, nyaris seteguh Pullman roti putih yang membangkitkan roti bertanya-tanya, tetapi dengan ketahanan yang lebih. Jenuh dengan madu dan blitzed dengan obor tangan sampai lengket di pusat dan terputus di atas, kemudian dimuat dengan dua sendok susu mentah es krim, mengejutkan murni dalam rasa, dan drizzled dengan madu lebih. Satu lebih membakar dan es krim mulai runtuh. Menyatukan manis diberikannya tarik hampir gravitasi: ini semacam terlalu banyak, tapi itu terus menyeret Anda kembali.Inkarnasi Thai ice cream sandwich, khanom pang ai tiim, mengesankan seperti yang disajikan di restoran Pok Pok Ny, di tepi jalan Columbia di Brooklyn. Empat gundukan keturunan es krim kelapa-nangka roti manis dari toko roti Cina, membagi di bagian atas untuk meniru lobster roll, dengan setetes di bawah ketan dimasak turun dengan gula dan beraroma pandan krim kelapa ($7). Roti ini cukup kokoh untuk menahan meleleh lambat tanpa hancur, dan kacang tanah hancur, sirup cokelat dan susu kental manis membuat hiasan ceroboh gratifyingly menggambarkan. Sayangnya, sandwich terlalu besar untuk mengambil dan makan; seperti pada Morgenstern, peralatan diperlukan.Two ice cream sandwiches come to an order ($5.50) at House of Inasal, a Filipino restaurant in Woodside, Queens. They suggest overgrown sliders in school-spirit colors: regal ube (purple yam) ice cream on golden rolls of baliwag, rich with eggs and milk. Each is adorned with a spackle of ube halaya, mashed purple yam thickened with coconut milk, sweetened condensed milk and a touch of butter; curls of young coconut; and scattered pops of pinipig, unripened glutinous rice that has been pounded and toasted to a state near Rice Krispies. The result is a fine reciprocity of crunch and give, and flavors that incline more toward buttery than sweet.Triangles of waffle, fresh from the iron, make up the fluffy outer strata of the sandwich ($6 to $7, depending on the kind of waffle) at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream, a minuscule shop in the East Village dominated by a wall of surrealist clocks with gold hands sweeping over celebrity faces (Flava Flav, George Michael). On a recent evening, the waffles were best paired with their time-honored companion, maple syrup, in the form of maple ice cream embedded with walnuts and hunks of maple-walnut pie. (This flavor has gone temporarily off the menu, but it’s worth exploring other options, as well as the occasionally available red velvet waffle.)More traditionally structured sandwiches ($6) are found at Ice & Vice, which currently operates as a pop-up stand but plans to open a shop on the Lower East Side this summer. Its offerings are open bids for nostalgia, like toasted milk ice cream packed between brownies mosaic-ed in broken Oreos, grinningly sweet. Tipsy Scoop, a catering company and online shop that delivers by messenger ($60 plus delivery fee for the minimum order of a dozen), puts chocolate-chip cookies around alcohol-infused ice cream: coffee mellowed by Frangelico and Patrón tequila-coffee liqueur, and cake vodka perfumed with amaretto and white chocolate liqueur. It’s a drink I’d be embarrassed to order, but as an unabashed dessert, it’s delicious. (The cookies are functional, nothing more.)One night at OddFellows Ice Cream Co., a shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose roster of flavors includes novelties like edamame and foie gras, the ice cream sandwich ($7) seemed surprisingly conservative: two perforated chocolate wafers around vanilla ice cream. But texture was everything, with a crush of hazelnuts on the outer rim and, lurking in the vanilla, an oozing stripe of caramel.Some makers of ice cream sandwiches show no interest in innovation, seeking only perfection. My favorite sandwich was the simplest, handed to me (for $4.99) from a stall run by Luca & Bosco in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. The ice cream was brown sugar molasses, with a lovely, almost subliminal bitterness holding the sweetness in check, between blocks of exceptionally dark, chewy brownie. I ate it on a bitter late-winter night, as the wind off the sidewalk found my coat’s every weakness and my fingers went half-numb. By then I’d tasted so many ice cream sandwiches, I feared I’d never look on one again with affection, and still I ate every bite.