Kris Hoogerhyde - Sweet cream and sugar cones: 90 recipes for making your own ice cream and frozen treats from Bi-Rite Creamery

MAKING THE ICE CREAM wasnt the challenge. After all, we are pastry chefs, and producing ice cream, granitas, and sorbets had been part of our daily routine long before we opened our ice cream shop. We had the techniques down pat, and we knew what flavors worked well together. But in those early days before we opened the doors of Bi-Rite Creamery, the thing that worried us most was how wed get enough people in the door.

There we were, sitting in one of the many planning meetings that took place before we opened, running the numbers to determine how many guests we would need each day in order to break even. When we realized that we would need to sell at least 150 ice cream cones on a given Saturday just to stay afloat, our stomachs sank. When you break it down, that comes out to five cones every half hour. It seemed a little unrealistic.

To our surprise and delight, it turned out not to be a problem. From the time we opened our doors on a typically cool and gray day in December 2006, theres been a near-constant line out the door. Our initial worry about how to get enough people in the door quickly changed to worrying about we could keep up with the demand.

Those 150 cones we set as the bare minimum? Within a few months of our grand opening we were selling that many within the first couple of hours each day; most Saturdays we sell ten times that, if not more. Last year we served more than half a million scoops of ice cream! Its kind of amazing, especially when you consider that every last scoop is made in a 100-square-foot state-certified room containing our one and only ice cream machine. With two full-time ice cream makers, Ezequiel and Luis, on staff, our machine hums from eight oclock in the morning until five oclock in the afternoon. On an average day, they pour fifty-one gallons of ice cream custard into the machine, enough to keep our case filled with eighteen to twenty different flavors, as well as fill our catering orders and the hand-pack containers for a handful of local restaurants and our sister business, Bi-Rite Market.

Its hard to believe that owning an ice cream shop wasnt even part of our original plan. For about four years, we had been making cookies, cakes, pies, and other treats for sale at Bi-Rite Market. That whole time we had been working out of a rented commercial kitchen, and there came a point when it made more sense to get our own kitchen. We looked at a number of spots throughout the city and finally settled on a 700-square-foot space that had previously been an office on 18th Street in San Franciscos Mission District. The new spot was perfect: it was the right size, we could build the kitchen to our exact specifications, and it was just across the street from the Market where our goods were being sold.

It also featured a retail spacean unplanned-for bonusthough it took us a little while to decide what to do with it. With our baked goods already for sale at Bi-Rite Market, plus the extremely popular Tartine Bakery just down the street, it didnt make sense to open another bakeshop. In the end, it was the spaces proximity to Dolores Park that led us to open an ice cream shop. Every time we drove past the park while delivering our baked goods to the Market, wed look at the parks hills dotted with people basking in the sun or playing with their kids. People who might want to come get a scoop of ice cream or so we hoped!

Our hunch was right. In six years of being in business, Bi-Rite Creamery has become a destination for parkgoers, neighbors, and tourists alike, and it attracts a steady stream of guestsas many as two thousand on a warm Saturday. Our initial staff of four has grown to thirty scoopers, bakers, managers, dishwashers, and ice cream makers that we now include in our ever-growing family. We have been featured on the Food Network, in travel guides, and in the New York Times, and we have garnered more Yelp reviews than any other business in America.

We are Anne Walker and Kris Hoogerhyde, founders of Bi-Rite Creamery. We started working together in 2000 at San Franciscos now-defunct 42 Degrees restaurant, where we made all of our ice cream by hand in an old-fashioned White Mountain ice cream machine that churned away on the restaurants back patio.

During that period we became obsessed with making the most intensely flavored ice cream possible. We felt that all too often ice cream just didnt taste enough of whatever it was supposed to be. Sometimes we would even put a spoonful of ice cream in our mouths and have no idea what flavor we were eating. We believed that lemon ice cream should be really lemony. Butter pecan should taste like butter and pecans. Chocolate ice cream should be intensely chocolaty.

We wanted our ice cream to overwhelm your senses with flavor, so we constantly looked for ways to push the limits. This sometimes required a lot of trial and error, but we kept at it until we got satisfactory results. By the time we opened our own shop we had already developed the recipes for many of the flavors were best known for: honey lavender, brown butter pecan, roasted banana, and more.

Aside from the guidance we received from a few mentors over the years, we developed our recipes and figured out everything on our own. Thats because the world of ice cream is shrouded in mystery: most ice cream pros keep their kitchens locked away from prying eyes and guard their recipes with their lives. Every aspect of making ice creamfrom the techniques to the ingredients to the equipment itselfis usually treated as a trade secret.