Salt & Straw

This one hits the spot when those extra-urgent chocolate desires kick in. An indulgent, almost hot-chocolatey chocolate ice cream lays the foundation for hearty chunks of chewy chocolate brownies made with homemade marshmallow fluff to keep them extra soft—even when frozen in ice cream. It’s the ultimate comfort food.

We set out to make the yummiest strawberry ice cream we could dream up, calling back to the sweet, pink-hued flavor memories of our childhood. The result? A rich strawberry ice cream made with roasted Oxnard strawberries, a touch of salt, and sweet cream swirled with creamy tres leches cake—lightly spiced cinnamon sponge cake soaked in sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and whole milk until it resembles cake batter—piped in like icing. Finished off with a swirl of bright strawberry vanilla jam, we consider this mission accomplished.

This one hits the spot when those extra-urgent chocolate desires kick in. An indulgent, almost hot-chocolatey chocolate ice cream lays the foundation for hearty chunks of chewy chocolate brownies made with homemade marshmallow fluff to keep them extra soft—even when frozen in ice cream. It’s the ultimate comfort food.

For this dusky purple delight with a cult following, we steep pounds of carefully selected lavender flowers in honey to bring out the buds’ delicate herbaceousness. While other folks use a lavender oil and can tip the scales towards perfume, our method treats lavender like fine tea, extracting just the right amount of flavor for a beautifully round, creamy taste kissed by a bit of honey.

It’s vanilla ice cream, dialed up to 11. You think you know vanilla ice cream? Prepare yourself—body and soul—for the cold, creamy vanilla epiphany that awaits you in every scoop.

Our signature flavor combines Guatemalan Fleur de Sel ice cream with ribbons of housemade, hand-burned caramel for a positively obsession-worthy blend of salty and sweet. We created this ice cream with Mark Bitterman, the ‘selmelier’ behind The Meadow, a family of world renowned salt shops in Portland and New York. He literally wrote the book on the subject—James Beard Award-winning cookbook Salted—and has aided many of our saltier ice cream experiments since 2011.

This flavor is packed with a mind-blowing explosion of salty, homemade cookie dough and malted fudge swirls.

We set out to make the yummiest strawberry ice cream we could dream up, calling back to the sweet, pink-hued flavor memories of our childhood. The result? A rich strawberry ice cream made with roasted Oxnard strawberries, a touch of salt, and sweet cream swirled with creamy tres leches cake—lightly spiced cinnamon sponge cake soaked in sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and whole milk until it resembles cake batter—piped in like icing. Finished off with a swirl of bright strawberry vanilla jam, we consider this mission accomplished.

Our friends at Sightglass Coffee in SoMa make such bold, full-bodied coffees that we wanted to craft a flavor that really showcases the rich, chocolatey flavors of their roasts. We start with a strong cold brew made with Sightglass’s Grostar, Utamagro beans—an earthy, wet-hulled coffee produced by a group of women in Sumatra—and add lightly caramelized cashews for a hit of texture and creamy praline goodness that keeps the coffee notes lingering as long as possible.

We love using Organic Roots’ Arbequina olive oil from Northern California for its intensity and character, and, believe it or not, ice cream is one of the best ways to fully appreciate the flavor of high-quality olive oil! The sweet, simple richness of cream and sugar is the perfect backdrop to let this single-varietal olive oil from this family-owned farm shine—close your eyes and you can taste every flavor note, from the tropical fruit flavors to the grassy, peppery notes this incredible olive oil is known for.

TCHO Chocolate is the godfather of ethical craft chocolate, carefully sourcing beans from fairly paid growers around the world and turning them into simply delicious chocolate in their Berkeley factory. In this flavor, that organic dark chocolate is the star of the show! We make a peppermint coconut ice cream for the perfect blend of creamy mintiness, then add untempered chocolate straight into the ice cream machine, where it shatters on contact into a million tiny chocolate freckles that melt in your mouth. It’s mint chocolate chip, perfected.

Cowgirl Creamery makes some of the best artisan cheese in America, inspiring the perfect cheese plate in ice cream form to show it off. We blend their Mt Tam cheese—rind and all— into the base of this flavor to capture both the funky notes and creamier-than-creamy richness of this perfect cheese. We then swirl in homemade sour cherry and apricot jam and bits of famed Ferry Building bakery Acme Bread’s Fruit and Walnut Bread that we toast and candy so they stay crunchy in every scoop!

Incredibly intense matcha from our friends at Breakaway in San Rafael forms the perfect base for this fresh, fruity flavor. We start by whisking the gorgeous green tea into cream and sugar with a splash of orange to round out the tea’s grassy flavors, pulling forward a delicate fruitiness. This green ice cream then gets hit with a bold, wine-deep roasted berry jam made with black raspberries and wild blueberries. The jam crystallizes like a granita to cut through the density of the matcha for a refreshing contrast in every scoop.

Anchor Distilling’s Old Potrero Rye whiskey is so unforgettably pure that we wanted to showcase its flavor in a fun and funky sorbet unlike any other. We kick up the flavor of the whisky with a dark, burnt caramel syrup, a touch of salt, and lightly roasted cocoa nibs. The sorbet’s clean palate allows the delicate flavors of the rye whiskey to flood your senses, flooding your mouth with complex flavors that you’ll miss if you blink—until your next bite, that is.

Our friends at Dandelion Chocolate roast, conch, and craft their own chocolate creations in San Francisco’s Mission District, so we dreamed up a totally over-the-top indulgent chocolatey ice cream to show off their goods. We start with a dark chocolate ice cream made with coconut cream and hazelnut milk, and swirl in stracciatella ribbons of SF’s-own Dandelion, and add chunks of our homemade gluten-free and vegan oreos. This one’s far creamier than any vegan ice cream you’ve ever experienced—all the better to showcase that incredible chocolate!

You’ll never look at figs the same way after this. Lifelong craftsmen Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor of Dick Taylor’s bean-to-bar chocolates place a heavy focus on the roasting process, finding the perfect threshold for every single-origin crop and even blending different roasts of the same bean to enhance the finished chocolate. To transform their perfectly harmonious black fig bar into ice cream, we’ve used their deeply roasted Madagascar chocolate to make both a light chocolate base and an assertive chocolate accompaniment to slow-roasted sherried black figs. Note the beautiful line where the roasted cacao ends and the roasted figs start.

A brittle ice cream for brittle naysayers. From La Cocina incubator graduate to Good Food Award–winning chocolatier, Christine Doerr of Belmont’s NeoCocoa has arrived with her line of unique shell-less truffles, crunchy bars, and delicate brittles. After sampling just a bit of her Black Sesame Seed Toffee Brittle, and a little more, and a little more, we decided to play off the brittle ingredients with a lightly cooked brown sugar caramel and freckles of semisweet chocolate. Find chunks of the outrageous sesame brittle itself ramped up with the brown sugar caramel and chocolate bits, all in a salted chocolate base.

We couldn’t sing the praises of this chocolate maker or innovative collaboration louder if we were Dandelion’s mother herself. Wildly popular Mission-based bean-to-bar producer who’s also leading the nation in chocolate education, Dandelion is thoughtful, transparent, and plain delightful. Eager to pass on the insight that their founders and sourcing team provided to us for testing, we’ve developed a fruity vegan sorbet base using the juice of the cacao fruit and contrasted it with candied Dandelion nibs and stracciatella. The tropical fruit notes in the base balance the bitterness of the cacao nibs and richness of perfectly executed chocolate.

The homecoming queen of chocolate cherry ice creams. Feve’s Shawn Williams, a three-time Good Food Award winner and “one of the last true chocolatiers,” hand-decorates with meticulous detail, sources with abundant generosity, and creates flavors with integrity and uniqueness. We knew that an ice cream inspired by his exquisite cherry truffle—made with heirloom cacao, tonka beans, and Massimo Bottura’s dark cherry vinegar—would be a challenge, but we finally got this duo of mellow vanilla and acidic cherry ice creams with boozy cherries and rich chocolate fudge just right.

Milk-chocolate and dark-chocolate lovers have called a truce on this one. Berkeley’s TCHO creates a wide variety of flavors but always focuses on their ethical sourcing program, the nuances of origin, and the malleable bean-to-bar process. We, on the other hand, focused on how delicious their cinnamon spice milk chocolate is. And then we turned it into ice cream. A slightly chocolatey base made with a touch of their dark chocolate plus our favorite cinnamon is plied with crunchy bits of addictive feuilletine coated in their spicy milk chocolate. We’re not to be held responsible for you finishing a whole pint in one sitting.