Up your ice cream game with Jeni Britton Bauer

The heatwave continues unabated in much of the Northern Hemisphere, which leaves many of us thinking about the best cold things to eat. Chief among those is ice cream, which is excellent any time of the year but especially welcome during the hot summer months. One of the best minds in the ice cream industry is Jeni Britton Bauer, author of two books dedicated to the subject. Jeni recently sat down with Plated to help us better understand the science of ice cream (tiered registration system). 

The founder and chief creative officer of Ohio-based  Jeni’s  Spendid Ice Creams feels like she was born to be an ice cream creator. “When I was 10, I knew I’d rather be an ice cream maker than struggle to become a lawyer just because somebody else thought that was a successful path,” she told Plated. And she’s done just that, with 34 locations of her ice cream shops to date. 

Jeni says her breakthrough was understanding how fat can carry flavor and fragrance. “I’d was thinking about becoming a perfumer and was working in a pastry kitchen when I figured that out. That’s when I realized ice cream could carry scent. In ice cream, you can layer butterfat with different scents like perfume, with top, middle, and base notes,” she says. Since there is also water in ice cream, it can carry both fat-soluble and water-soluble flavors.