the quest for vanilla soft serve
why is soft serve a small town food?
Since the first sticky, sweltering day in D.C., I’ve been fighting with this bone-deep craving for vanilla custard soft serve. Walking down 14th Street in the unforgiving sun at 1 p.m. would be about 100% better if I could stop to buy a swirl of vanilla in a cone. Just picture it: sweat, sunburn, bug bites, ambulance sirens, all fade to nothing with that first lick.
As a child of Eastern Pennsylvania, I grew up taking vanilla custard for granted. I remember the dusky evenings the first summer I could drive, taking sharp turns at too-high speeds just to make it to Rita’s Water Ice before closing, then the careful drive home with melting lemon water ice and custard and sometimes lemon and vanilla piled together (called a gelati, for those unlucky souls who live outside of Rita’s realm) in the cupholders. I could have soft serve whenever I wanted it, and so I didn’t particularly crave it. It just was.
I’m not talking about your typical Dairy Queen or McDonald’s soft serve, for those of you wondering why I’m fantasizing about an icy white concoction that hints at artificial vanilla. I’m talking about soft-serve custard, an egg-yolk-filled ice cream that is somehow fatty and creamy and thick, like whole-milk ricotta cheese or mozzarella, and simultaneously as airy and light as freshly whipped cream.
The problem? There is no obvious place to buy a swirl of vanilla custard within the boundaries of this godforsaken city. (I usually love D.C., but my failed quest has temporarily maligned this place.) And once I realized that there was nowhere to quench my craving, it went from a desire to an obsession. I had to have it. Eating some cold noodles for lunch, wishing it could be soft serve. Eating homemade ravioli with friends, dreaming of a vanilla cone. No other food would do.
I first tried to satisfy my craving with a superior vanilla hard ice cream. Unlike custard, regular ice cream is so prolific it’s kind of boring. You’ll pay $8-9, of course, but that crime fails to perturb the D.C. ice-cream-consuming public and couldn’t dissuade me in the face of my desperation. First I tried Mount Desert Island: Great ice cream, not getting anywhere near the craving. Then I tried Jeni’s: SUBERB vanilla, maybe the best vanilla I’ve ever had. And yet…
Soft serve custard actually doesn’t have much in common with regular ice cream. It’s closer to very cold whipped cream, the texture airy and fluffy and smooth. The density of regular vanilla just wasn’t hitting. The soft serve Wikipedia page tells me that the percentage of air within the ice cream actually makes it feel fattier than it is, especially when aerated at temperatures just above freezing. That feels right to me.
Most people in my life have met my complaints about D.C.’s lack of custard with blank stares. I could literally see the eyes losing focus when I started on my little rant. Some friends suggested restaurants like Rasa, Doi Moi, and Yellow, which all offer soft serve for dessert, but I wasn’t looking for specialty flavors at the end of a meal. I didn’t want a chef trying to make it chic. I wanted a thick vanilla cone for outdoor strolls through the city.
Rarely does reality match the imagination when it’s been allowed to run wild for this long, but at the beach this weekend, my first soft serve in years actually hit harder. It was a spiritual moment. The Kohr Bro’s on Bethany Beach has earned my lifelong endorsement. I didn’t even change up the order on Sunday’s return visit, despite the beguiling menu of orange sherbet twists, mint-chocolate, and even a gorgeous chocolate dip coating.
My craving has baffled me. The joy I felt this weekend, even more so. I was not a vanilla child, and I preferred dense scoops to creamy swirls. I grew up ordering extra dark extra chocolate with chocolate sprinkles on summer beach trips. I turned up my nose at my dad’s odd predilection for vanilla and dismissed him as a boring grown-up. Vanilla was for the people who couldn’t appreciate the stuff of life. (I was a snob who wanted to be different, even more so as a child than I am now). I wanted the thick, fatty, bitter, dark, richness of chocolate, always.
I rarely give my boyfriend the credit he deserves for inspiring the direction of this newsletter, but vanilla, as he reminded me this weekend, is actually the most complex of flavors. Real vanilla is the oil scraped out of long, thin green beans that grow in bunches off of creeping orchid flower vines; we picture it as a creamy color and associate it with boring “white” foods because of the eggshell vanilla flower petals that embody the plant in our collective minds. While the “vanillin” organic compound is always present in vanilla beans, the multitude of flavors and aromas created by each orchid flower makes vanilla spicy, sweet, herbaceous, and floral, often noticeably varied depending on the year and the location where the plants are grown. Vanilla isn’t one-note. It’s sophisticated, delicate, and subtle.
And despite its reputation as a fast-food icon, the texture of soft serve is much the same — complicated, unusual, and marvelous.
A lot of people loving something doesn’t make it bad or boring. While the soft serve Wikipedia page doesn’t tell me why I can’t find a vanilla custard swirl in DC, I’m beginning to believe it might be the same subconscious mindset that had me rejecting vanilla as a kid. Nobody wants to think of themselves as basic and boring, especially restaurant owners and ice cream makers trying to make it in the city. In D.C., the ice cream shops are selling themselves as high-brow, sophisticated, and complicated, just as their clientele wishes to see themselves. I love the grapefruit campari sorbet at Dolcezza, which hits every adult sophisticated dopamine button I’ve got, but I’ll fight anyone who tells me their inner soul isn’t crying out for a little airy creamy vanilla instead.
I’m back in Eastern PA this week, and I made a little trip to Rita’s just to see if my hazy high school memories still mesh with reality. This Rita’s, like so many of them, was a tiny storefront window set in the corner of a strip mall off the highway. A massive swirl of vanilla cost me $4.50. Even in the middle of the day, as I stood next to the road and moaned my way through more ice cream than I could finish, people of all ages leaned against their cars or sat under the overhang of the sidewalk, doing the same. It was an ordinary summer day, unburdened by subconscious metropolitan expectations. It was nice.
It's not in DC, but you should try Dairy Godmother in Del Ray (Wisconsin frozen custard) and Spelunker's (burgers and custard and much further out in VA but great in the fall if you go out to Skyline drive for the foliage).