Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Ice cream is fun, but making it is serious business. That's the vibe of Nicholas Morgenstern's new cookbook. You may be familiar with Morgenstern's ice cream parlor, which opened in its inaugural spot in 2014 on the Lower East Side. It quickly became known for its complexities and inventiveness of its flavors. The ice shop goes deep on the classics. Any given day, it serves five to seven types of vanilla ice cream, but there are surprises to be found in flavors like cinnamon raisin toast, banana curry, french fry.

Recipes like that and dozens more can be found in the new cookbook, Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream. Nicholas Morgenstern joins me now to discuss. Welcome to All Of It.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Congratulations on the book. The pictures are really beautiful.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: The ice cream making. You brought me ice cream.

Nicholas Morgenstern: I did.

Alison Stewart: We're going to get to that in a minute.

Nicholas Morgenstern: I've made the mistake of not bringing ice cream before.

Alison Stewart: People are, "Out. Out you go."

Nicholas Morgenstern: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You originally were a pastry chef, correct?

Nicholas Morgenstern: That's right.

Alison Stewart: Why did you choose pastry?

Nicholas Morgenstern: The education was shorter.

Alison Stewart: That's it?

Nicholas Morgenstern: It's more technical, and so it was a natural thing for me. More of a fit for me. I was doing auto mechanics before I went to trade school for pastry.

Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh.

Nicholas Morgenstern: There's some technical elements to doing pastry, and it was a different time. I went to culinary school in 1997, so the vibe of the industry and all of that was a different thing. For me, it was about learning a trade, learning how to do something well, and figuring out something to support myself with.

Alison Stewart: When did you gravitate towards ice cream?

Nicholas Morgenstern: I was interested in it for a very long time. All of the jobs that I had working in restaurants and hotels, almost all of them had an ice cream machine, and I found myself on that machine most of the times. That's not always the case. There's a lot of people working in a pastry department, depending on how big the operation is. I had made ice cream in most of the places that I worked, and I was always interested in it. I was also really excited and inspired to make an ice cream cart.

I opened a restaurant in New York in 2008 and built an ice cream cart and put the ice cream cart in front of the restaurant, and it was really, really successful, and also a lot of fun.

Alison Stewart: You have a page in this book, which you really, really get into your family history. It's kind of your ice cream origin story.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You're raised in California by a single mom. She sends you and your brother to your grandparents in Ohio each month, which is a little bit of a culture shock for you. What do you remember about that time?

Nicholas Morgenstern: The main takeaway for me is the difference in the food. Growing up in post-hippie San Francisco, pre-tech, pre-dot-com, so pretty crunchy. A lot of raw kale salads and things like that. Steamed chicken, I don't recommend. Then going to the Midwest, where Grandpa Morgenstern was a very meat-and-potatoes type of a guy, and so I was eating that kind of food. We didn't eat a lot of sugar at home in San Francisco with my mom and Grandpa Morgenstern finished every meal with a bowl of ice cream. Sometimes there was pie, but there was always ice cream in the freezer.

He had grown up in the Depression and had gone to the military and then came back and worked in a dairy, and so ice cream was a really important thing for him. It was an important indulgence. Having it in the house was a marker of success and quality of life. Even though he lived a very modest and conservative lifestyle, ice cream was one of those things. Butter pecan was Grandpa Morgenstern's flavor, and I serve it at Morgenstern's periodically. We change our menu every year. It's not as popular as I wish it was.

Flavors culturally do weird things. We serve a lot of flavors, so we get a lot of information on what people want to eat in an ice cream flavor.

Alison Stewart: You've got to have butter pecan because of Grandpa.

Nicholas Morgenstern: I do. It's not on the menu this year. We do serve it. We're pleasantly surprised that it's popular when it is on the menu.

Alison Stewart: When you decided that you wanted to open your own ice cream shop, you had to have a list of things that were important to you. What was important to you?

Nicholas Morgenstern: The quality of the product, quality of the ice cream. That's the top. That's the driving force for everything that we do and the reason that we are there doing it. I built the store myself, which was a lot of work. I had to learn how to do a lot of things in order to do that. All of the decisions around building the store and building the operation were guided towards making the best ice cream. No preservatives. We buy all of our products locally, except for some specialty ingredients that we want for special flavors. We make all the product ourselves. We make almost everything.

I don't make Junior Mints or Oreos, and those are popular flavor additions, but everything else, we make in the store ourselves.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book, Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream, that your first experience with ice cream in New York was, "I felt offended. Offended that something so good was being made so badly."

Nicholas Morgenstern: It's true.

Alison Stewart: What was wrong with the ice cream? What do people get wrong about making ice cream?

Nicholas Morgenstern: New York is an interesting ice cream town. It goes through waves and phases of ice cream here. I've been here for 25 years, and I've seen things through, like Tasti D-Lite and then Pinkberry.

Alison Stewart: Tasti D-Lite. Oh, my God.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Yes, do you remember? Red Mango. Emack & Bolios was a big thing here for a long time. They're still, Emack & Bolios, banging around. When I came here, I was working as a cook. I was working in fine dining restaurants. Back then, before the interwebs, it was to read the Zagat, if you went to a city as a cook. You would read the Zagat cover to cover to understand what people were doing, and the ice cream category was very trim and slim. In New York, there weren't a lot of places to go.

I went to a place. I'm not going to say what it is, but they served pistachio ice cream. Just hindsight to 2020, but they were using a lot of preservatives. The product was probably made very far from New York City, like hundreds of miles away, so it had all kinds of stabilizers and gums and things. Then it had those very lonely two pistachios in my scoop of ice cream. I just thought, "I know this can be so much better, and they're not doing it." My thesis was, if you make it better, people will like it and they'll buy it. I was right. When I put a little cart in front of my store, people really liked the ice cream.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking with Nicholas Morgenstern, the founder of Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream. He has a cookbook out now. Listeners, have you been to Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream? What do you like about it? Do you have a favorite flavor? Give us a call. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You also have a question for Nick Morgenstern? He's here. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. Got a text here that says, "Butter pecan was my father's favorite, too. Can't beat it."

Nicholas Morgenstern: It's an old school flavor.

Alison Stewart: Let's start with a couple of things that set your ice cream apart, especially because New York's going a little bit of [unintelligible 00:07:23] ice cream right now. You do not use eggs in your ice cream.

Nicholas Morgenstern: That's right.

Alison Stewart: No eggs.

Nicholas Morgenstern: There are flavors that have egg in them, but only when we want the flavor of egg.

Alison Stewart: Why don't you use eggs?

Nicholas Morgenstern: I get this question a lot. The big reason is that frozen egg or custard has a flavor. Crème brûlée has a specific taste and flavor, as opposed to, say, a panna cotta, if you ever had a panna cotta. The flavor is of egg and custard. That's what it is. It already creates a base, unctuous, rich, and stick to the roof of your mouth quality. I find that it gets in the way of some of the other more subtle flavors. My favorite flavor is vanilla. I prefer vanilla sans egg. That's my preference. Though if you're going to give me a French custard, I love that. I know what it is. I understand that.

We love to pair those two things side by side for people when we are serving a French custard ice cream, and we suggest that you get a scoop of that, alongside a scoop of our Madagascar vanilla, which is essentially the same thing, but no eggs. You will quickly realize why we don't use eggs in most of our ice cream.

Alison Stewart: All right. Tripadvisor reviews say that the store doesn't necessarily give samples.

Nicholas Morgenstern: We do not give samples.

Alison Stewart: You have to really commit to some of these flavors.

Nicholas Morgenstern: That's my philosophy. I gave samples for a long time. I write in the book, and it's the way that I am. I probably stopped asking for samples of ice cream when I was seven, just because you go in and you go to the place, and yes, you should commit. Other places can offer samples. At Morgenstern's, I stand behind the quality of our product. If you see something on my menu and you know what it is and you like it, I hope that you trust that I'm going to do it in the best way that it can be done.

If you're curious about something, we're really obsessive about balancing the quality of our flavor, the texture. You're not going to go wrong. It's very Unusual for someone to say, "I really don't like this." If there's a flavor that's polarizing, black licorice, french fry, pickles, and mayonnaise. Those are strange flavors that we serve. You know what you're getting into, I hope.

Alison Stewart: We'll get to those in a minute. Five to seven types of vanilla every day. What distinguishes them?

Nicholas Morgenstern: It depends on the season and what we're doing, but we make sure that the characteristics of each of the flavors have their own identity. In this case, when we opened the store in 2014, we had five vanillas on the menu. That was Madagascar, burnt honey vanilla, bourbon vanilla, probably salt and pepper. I have to think about what the other one was. We've served a lot of different vanillas, and it's an interesting exercise for people to see that.

Vanilla is such a complex ingredient. There's a lot written about it in the book about the importance of vanilla, and also how important it is to order vanilla ice cream at a place where they're actually using vanilla beans. Most vanilla in the world is imitation vanilla.

Alison Stewart: Completely.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Sadly, most people can't tell the difference in blind taste tests. I think I can tell the difference. We love working with fresh vanilla beans. All of our vanilla beans come from Madagascar, where I think they have the best vanilla. It's also just an interesting side note of how complex an environment Madagascar is, both for growing really complex ingredients, and also, the sociopolitical situation in Madagascar is always extremely unstable, so vanilla is this thing that's up and down.

The best vanilla in the world comes from a place that can produce the best, but has a hard time getting it to market. I have bought a lot of vanilla beans. Tens of thousands of dollars from guys that are bringing it to me in a suitcase, not from your regular distributor.

Alison Stewart: Sounds like you know some organized crime. Let's take a couple calls. You ready?

Nicholas Morgenstern: Sure.

Alison Stewart: All right. Let's talk to Reed. Hey, Reed. Thanks for calling in. You're calling in from Brooklyn.

Reed: Hey, Alison. Long time, long time. I have to say, I appreciate, Nick, the no-tasting rule, because if I'm standing in line waiting to get a cone, and there's someone in front of me at another ice cream shop, it's three, four of them. "Just please make up your mind. There's six people behind. It's 95 degrees. Can we get moving?" I love ice cream, but as everyone knows, it doesn't always love us back. I got this thing recently called Ninja CREAMi, which is basically like a home Pacojet. You can freeze whatever stuff into an ice block.

It's like this blender that will then shred and puree it into a pretty well-emulsified mix. I was wondering if you had any experience with those. I know you guys stressed in shops that you guys don't use any stabilizers or preservatives, and a lot of people on-- This device recommend using a [unintelligible 00:12:26] as a way to get around to that and still maintain that texture for this very specific product, which I'm not sure if you heard of.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Reed, you're preaching to the choir on no-samples. Number one, the line at Morgenstern's is a big problem, so I'm with you on keeping the line moving. Thank you for supporting us. A lot of people get really upset about the no-samples rule. Ninja CREAMi, interesting tool. Technically, not making ice cream because you are not aerating or forcing air overrun into your ice cream while you are freezing it. You are making a very, very, very smooth smoothie.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Nicholas Morgenstern: You can freeze any of the bases. I'm thinking about this. I have a Pacojet. I have a lot of experience working with Pacojets. The Ninja CREAMi, brilliant invention for them to basically take the Pacojet and make it accessible for the home market. In the book, I strongly recommend that you use a rock salt and ice machine for making your ice cream at home, in my professional opinion. I own two of these machines. We tested every single recipe rigorously, blindly on these machines.

I think that's the best quality ice cream that you can make at home, unless you're going to spend several thousand dollars on an ice cream machine with a compressor. The Ninja CREAMi makes something cool. I think the challenge that you're going to find with that is that if you don't add some kind of a stabilizer, a gum or some kind of modified starch, you're going to find that you freeze your block, you spin it, and then when you go to freeze it again to get serving consistency, which is what you're supposed to do, it's going to be hard.

Generally, I'm going to say generally, it's going to be hard. Potentially, it's going to be icy. The stabilizers are going to help give you a little bit more give to your product. That's why I'm not going to do it. I don't recommend the Ninja CREAMi.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Alec from Rockaway. Hi, Alec, you're on the air.

Alec: Hey, Alison. Hey, Nick. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to give a quick aside and just say that me and my friends, we love Morgenstern so much. We make the pilgrimage from Rockaway for Morgenstern. Sit in the park afterwards or just walk around downtown. We especially love coming in the winter when the ice cream doesn't melt. You can walk down the street. I wanted to say that I really dig the chocolate sorbet. It's refreshing, simultaneously super rich. I don't know. It's great. It's all great, so thanks.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Thanks, Alec. I appreciate that. The chocolate sorbet is a very serious subject for us.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Nicholas Morgenstern: It's vegan and making-- Chocolate sorbet is just water, sugar, and chocolate. Ours has cocoa powder as well as salt in it, and it can be like a pinnacle of frozen chocolate, is sorbet. I give my list of my three favorite ice cream shops in the world. Number one. On the Île Saint-Louis, of course. They do their chocolate de mer, which is their chocolate sorbet, which is, for me, is one-- Berthillon. Sorry, I didn't give the name. Berthillon. Their chocolat amer, their chocolate sorbet, is one of the best chocolate things I've ever eaten in my life.

Their fruit sorbet is apricot-raspberry, pairing with the chocolate. If you go in the off-season fall, you get the pear sorbet with the chocolate. Delicious. Giolitti in Rome for your authentic Italian disaster gelato experience, where there's people cutting you in line and sCREAMing and yelling and throwing whipped cream over the counter. Outstanding. Then my third favorite is Dairy Queen, which people are really surprised by.

Alison Stewart: DQ.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Yes, I love DQ. I eat a lot of DQ, actually. As far as on an annual basis, it's probably my most consumed frozen dessert outside of my own. I think you can't beat their soft serve, and who doesn't love a Peanut Buster parfait?

Alison Stewart: Barbara from the Upper West Side is calling in. Hey, Barbara, you're on with Nicholas Morgenstern, the owner of Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream.

Barbara: Hi. My question-- [beep]

Alison Stewart: Oh.

Barbara: Coffee ice cream. Coffee ice cream is my very favorite. I'm a New Yorker, but I think I don't find it outside of New York very much. The best that I found is [unintelligible 00:16:55]. Deeply coffee. Not sweet. Really good, and creamy. Really good. Do you know--

Nicholas Morgenstern: Have you tried our Vietnamese coffee?

Barbara: I have not. I have not.

Nicholas Morgenstern: If you like that, if you like that profile of very rich coffee-- I take coffee ice cream very seriously. I did bring some Vietnamese coffee.

Alison Stewart: You did. It's got ice cream in the middle.

Nicholas Morgenstern: That has a little bit of condensed milk, which does make it sweet, but if you eat around the condensed milk, you're going to get a very, very strong coffee ice cream flavor.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nicholas Morgenstern. His new book is called Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream: A Cookbook. If you have a question or you just want to shout out Morgenstern your favorite flavor, our number is 212-433-9692. 212-433- WNYC. You brought in two flavors, so I'll ask you this question while I eat some. What made you want to write an ice cream cookbook?

Nicholas Morgenstern: I did not want to write an ice cream cookbook.

Alison Stewart: Got to talk longer than that so I can eat the ice cream.

Nicholas Morgenstern: We just crossed our 10-year anniversary last year, and I felt like we finally had enough-

Alison Stewart: That's good.

Nicholas Morgenstern: -in the catalog to put it down.

Alison Stewart: It's really good.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Okay, good. I'm glad. What are you tasting? The honey or the coffee?

Alison Stewart: It's the coffee.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Oh, the Vietnamese coffee.

Alison Stewart: It's so good. Yes, keep going.

Nicholas Morgenstern: It's a lot of work to write a cookbook. It's a lot of work, but I wanted to document what we have been doing at Morgenstern's for the last 10 years. We've never published a recipe before, so it's like coveted trade secrets.

Alison Stewart: Was that hard for you to let go?

Nicholas Morgenstern: There was a time when it was very hard. Once I decided that I was going to let go, it was really easy for me to just-- It's great to share. It's great to share. Sharing the information. We get a lot of questions. I get a lot of questions on my Instagram about how to take care of things, and people having questions about problems.

Alison Stewart: Now we're going to share the burnt vanilla.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Yes. That combination, by the way, is like a cult favorite for a lot of people. It's those two flavors together, which is the burnt honey vanilla and the Vietnamese coffee.

Alison Stewart: I'll just have to try them separately, and then together.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Then together. That's right.

Alison Stewart: Hey, you talk to Patty from Brooklyn. Hi, Patty. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Patty: Hi. I'm a former Dairy Queen employee, and I'm very curious about where you think the best soft serve is in New York.

Nicholas Morgenstern: I think we serve excellent soft serve at our Morgenstern's BANANAS location, where we make all of our soft serve with the same integrity that we make all of our ice cream. That's my top pick. After that, I still go to Long Island for Dairy Queen.

Alison Stewart: To DQ.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Really, truly, that's my-- I hate to say, that's my answer. Making soft serve is really tricky. The machinery is really tricky, and Dairy Queen has figured it out. They understand how important it is to get that product to be super consistent. I find that places in the city, the product is inconsistent.

Alison Stewart: All right, I'm going for the double dip.

Nicholas Morgenstern: There you go.

Alison Stewart: See? Right?

Nicholas Morgenstern: That's a big bite.

Alison Stewart: All right. Oh, nice.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Good combo, right? Unexpected.

Alison Stewart: All right.

Nicholas Morgenstern: The burnt honey is made by cooking the honey, burning the honey with the vanilla beans together. You get a very rich, unctuous honey flavor.

Alison Stewart: Oh, good use of the word unctuous. If someone gets your cookbook, wants to start the bare minimum at home, their amateur hour, what do they need?

Nicholas Morgenstern: You need a pot, a mixing bowl. I'd say you need a whisk, but you could get away without. A rubber spatula is ideal, but you can do it with a wooden spoon. You're going to need some ingredients. The only ingredient that you might not necessarily find in your cabinet is going to be milk powder. Then you need that rock salt and ice machine that I was describing earlier, which are readily available online. You can get them new on all of the usual places that I'm not going to name here. I do really recommend looking for one of the older machines on eBay.

Alison Stewart: How do you decide your combinations? You mentioned pickles-

Nicholas Morgenstern: Two flavors--

Alison Stewart: -and charred eggplant. Is it just try them and see what works?

Nicholas Morgenstern: There's some of that. The book, like the store, is organized by the categories of ice cream. Vanilla, chocolate, coffee. Then within each of those categories, there's several flavors. In the vanilla, you mentioned there's five to seven vanilla flavors. In the coffee flavor category, there will be three or four. That structure allows us to figure out which direction we're going to go. We know that we're always going to make three or four coffee flavors, and then we're just deciding which ones we're going to do.

The flavors that you're talking about, you're asking the questions about the pickles and mayo, that's in the miscellaneous category. I think you need to have a miscellaneous category. That is like throwing stuff at the wall and just seeing what is going to be exciting and interesting. A lot of times, it's about food trends. What's happening now. Pickles and mayo, surprisingly very, very popular.

Alison Stewart: Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream: A Cookbook. It is by Nicholas Morgenstern. Thank you so much for the ice cream, and thanks for coming by.

Nicholas Morgenstern: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: There'll be more All Of It after the break, and more ice cream.