From caramelized garlic toffee to caprese, Franklin Fountain rolls out limited edition experimental ice cream flavors
The old school ice cream shop is introducing new flavors every few weeks—the first flight got snapped up within hours.
For the last three months, kitchen staff at Franklin Fountain have been moonlighting as mad ice cream scientists. Now, they’re ready to show you their creations.
From now through the end of August, the old-school scoop shop and confectionery at 116 Market St. in Old City will be offering limited-edition drops of experimental ice cream pints and flights in flavors that range from plum and prickly pear to cherry wood, caramelized garlic toffee, and Caprese. Details about each drop will be revealed in the days prior on the ice cream parlor’s Instagram and Facebook.
The new promotion breaks with the shop’s ethos as a shrine to classic ice cream culture: Brothers Ryan and Eric Berley opened Franklin Fountain in 2004 as a replica of an ice cream shop and soda fountain circa 1915, a time when ice cream was marketed as a health food. Employees dress as soda jerks, scooping old-timey flavors and sundaes into period-accurate cardboard boxes that look like Chinese takeout containers. Most everything in the ice cream parlor comes with a history lesson — save for these new recipes, which come from the minds of ice cream manager Franny Zehmer and her lead ice cream spinner, the Walnut Hill College-trained Ryan Feldman.
“It was a wonderful way to get creative and have an outlet” during the winter, said Zehmer, which is historically Franklin Fountain’s slow season. The duo spent January through March in research and development, testing the boundaries of what actually can be mixed into ice cream.
“Franny got annoyed with me constantly saying, ‘What if we tried this one?’ so she made me dump every idea I ever had into a document,” said Feldman.
The result was list of close to 100 unique flavors. On the cutting-room floor: a six-scoop flight of cocktail-themed ice creams that included riffs on the French 75 and Manhattan; tiramisu; and the Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy shoofly pie, most of which Zehmer said were too played out.
“They’ve been done before,” she said. “And they just weren’t weird enough.”
Zehmer and Feldman’s first drop was April 3 and featured just 22 pints of caramelized garlic toffee ice cream, plus 17 flights of four charcuterie-themed flavors — olive oil, fig, brie, and moliterno, a sharp Italian sheep’s milk cheese. The duo expected the flights to linger in the fridges at Franklin Fountain for about a week.
Instead, they sold out the same day, Zehmer said, with ten getting scooped up by customers within 20 minutes of the store opening at 11 a.m.
“We weren’t sure how popular it was going to be ... and if the flavor was going to take off, we didn’t want to play catch up with demand,” Zehmer said.
For Friday’s release, Zehmer caramelized garlic for two hours to make the toffee, straining extra brown butter to add to the ice cream’s base. The brie and moliterno were made with cheese procured from Reading Terminal Market’s Downtown Cheese Shop, the latter of which made for a flavor that Feldman compared to no-bake cheesecake filling.
What’s next in the lineup?
Franklin Fountain has 12 other limited edition ice cream drops planned through Aug. 22, each of which will include roughly 30 ice cream pints or 20 ice cream flights, according to Zehmer. Purchases also come with a QR code that enables customers to vote for their favorite flavors to come back as official seasonal scoops.
The next release will be pints of elderberry goat cheese ice cream on Friday April 17, followed by Iranian Bastani ice cream — which combines saffron, rose, and pistachio — and a flight of tea-infused flavors (hydrangea, London Fog, chai, honeysuckle) on May 2.
Zehmer is most excited for the experiment’s final flight, a quartet of thyme, rosemary, basil, and sage ice creams that will be available on Aug. 22. The grouping’s herb flavors are subtle, save for the Shamrock Shake-colored sage variety. It tastes bright and grassy, almost if someone turned green juice into ice cream.
To extract the flavors, Zehmer and Feldman experimented with cold-steeping herbs from Riverwards Produce in whole milk for two days at a time before adding it to their ice cream base. The result reminds Zehmer of the seasonal Thai basil flavor from The Parlour in Durham, N.C., her hometown ice cream shop, but also of a spice cabinet.
“We wanted to go for recognizable herbs,” she said, “like the stuff you’d put in an alfredo sauce.”