How Philly’s best ice cream gets made

It was research and development day at Milk Jawn, and Amy Wilson stared down a neat row of possible ingredients: a 5-ounce jar of soy sauce, a bunch of ripe bananas, two canisters of roasted unsalted peanuts, a bag of sweetened flaked coconut, sweet hojicha green tea cocoa powder, purple yam jam, and a bottle of Evan Williams bourbon.

Wilson, 49, has been the flavor maven behind Milk Jawn ever since she started the acclaimed South Philly-based ice cream company in her home kitchen in 2012.

Milk Jawn’s scoop shop has 20 flavors at a time, with up to six rotating out throughout the year. They range from the classic to the offbeat, but are never so odd as to feel like novelty tricks. When I tried the Lemon Curd with Blueberry Basil Swirl recently, it was a perfect spoonful of summer, like Willy Wonka’s chewing gum evoking a three-course meal. I wanted to understand how Wilson does it. (She co-owns the company with Ryan Miller and Cathryn Sanderson.)

The 2,400-square-foot commercial kitchen in the Italian Market was bustling on a recent Tuesday morning. Two employees scooped vanilla ice cream with fudge into half-moon-shaped waffle cones to make a limited run of Choco Tacos, while another stirred a 16-quart steel pot of blueberries. The smell of basil wafted through the air.

The kitchen is surprisingly analog considering the brand has two scoop shops and pints available in more than a dozen stores across the city. It’s the kind of place where employees crack all the eggs by hand for lemon curd.

With Halloween approaching, Wilson wanted to develop a series of flavors inspired by Almond Joy, Snickers, and Mallo Cup candy bars. (“I whittled it down,” Wilson said of the list.) She also wanted to try out a Bourbon Caramel for the East Passyunk Witch Craft Crawl in October, and an autumnal Chocolate Chai.

She was working with assistant production manager Jesi Laday to test them out. Using a dairy ice cream base from a Lancaster farm, Wilson and Laday mixed and waited and tasted, adding a dash of coconut essence here and a handful of toasted coconut flakes there.

“It takes a long time to hit on something,” said Wilson, in pink sneakers and black skinny jeans, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. “That’s the mad scientist phase.”

Laday, in a pink knit hat and gray apron, was focused on a vegan version of the Almond Joy, but the chocolate was giving her trouble. Dark chocolate was too intense and oat milk chocolate, paired with almonds, made the whole thing taste like trail mix. Now Laday was testing a milk chocolate by the vegan brand EnjoyLife.

“It’s tastes vegan, a little bit,” she said after the first bite. That was not ideal.

It usually takes about three days to finish a flavor, which is mixed, steeped overnight, tasted and tweaked, and then frozen. After finalizing a recipe, it takes at least two weeks of production to make enough of any new flavor to get it to customers.

For the neighborhood Witch Craft Crawl, Wilson and Laday would only make a small batch, so they had room to play. They were stumped by the bourbon, though.

“That would be 9 tablespoons of bourbon, which feels like a lot,” said Laday as she heated up heavy cream, examining the recipe Wilson had written out.

“I have a feeling it won’t be enough,” Wilson said.

To devise new flavors, Wilson describes herself as a “collector.” She draws on cookbooks and New York Times articles, cocktail recipes and childhood memories. Some of the resulting flavors are deluxe versions of classics, like Milk and Cookies or Mint Stracciatella. Others are more imaginative, like a Harvest Corn made from local corn with Old Bay seasoning, or a Pink Chai & White Chocolate made with green tea and star anise.

Sometimes she’ll taste another dessert and become obsessed. After tasting Cake Life’s lemon blackberry cake at her brother’s wedding, she took home the extra (“I hoarded all of that flavored cake”), eventually using it as inspiration for her Lemon Curd with Blueberry Swirl.

Aside from taste, there are business realities to consider: Some flavors are delicious but too expensive to make, like one infused with jasmine tea. Others, like the Salted Caramel, took months to perfect because the first version was made with a bitter dark caramel, which Wilson loved but thought might turn some customers off.

And of course there have been dreams that didn’t pan out. A lychee ice cream didn’t have enough oomph; a grapefruit olive oil cake flavor had a bad texture and a grapefruit custard that was too labor-intensive. Boba freezes solid, and they didn’t want to crack anyone’s tooth. Wilson and Laday are still trying to perfect a brown butter flavor, without making it taste like an actual stick of butter.

This fall’s Chocolate Chai has been elusive because Wilson and Laday were trying to conjure a specific flavor from scratch. They spent weeks fiddling with the recipe, changing the brand of tea, punching up the ginger, letting it steep overnight and tasting it again.

“It took a while to get there, because it wasn’t like we had something we were trying to imitate,” Laday said. It was a product of pure imagination, made real.

“I’m really hoping we can start spinning next week,” Wilson said.

For the Almond Joy, inspired partly by the candy bar and partly by the ice cream bar, Wilson pre-mixed a coconut ice cream base and split it into thirds. She infused each with varying levels of coconut flakes, some toasted, some not. After spinning the base in her two-pint tabletop ice cream maker — the same one she used at home when ice cream was just a hobby — she dug in with a small metal spoon. Laday watched closely.

“A lot of the times I’m waiting for a cue from Amy because Amy’s got crazy-sensitive taste buds,” Laday said.

The version made with sweetened, untoasted coconut flakes was a letdown — too plain. Wilson paused for a few moments, moving her head slowly from side to side, thinking. She decided to experiment, adding a few drops of essence of coconut and respinning the ice cream.

“That little bit helped,” she said.

She tried another version, the coconut base with toasted flakes that had been strained out after 30 minutes the night before. She nodded, eyes ahead, considering. Something was working. She imagined what she could do with it, what to pair the rich coconut with, what the final Milk Jawn package might be.

“That,” she said, “is really good.”