Ice cream screams fresh and local
Restaurateur Lee Ellis didn’t casually go about trying to create what he considers Houston’s best locally made and locally sourced ice cream. It took him years to scoop together the time, energy, research, ingredients and recipes that eventually went into making his ideal version of frozen velvet — rich, airless and impossibly creamy — that now bears a name and a brand.
Lee’s Creamery recently launched under Ellis’ Cherry Pie Hospitality restaurant group, which includes State Fare Lee’s Fried Chicken & Donuts, Petite Sweets and the soon-to-open Pi Pizza. The ice cream is currently being served at all Cherry Pie stores — at Lee’s Fried Chicken & Donuts, it also figures in a decadent ice cream sandwich made with two glazed doughnuts — in limited flavor varieties.
But Petite Sweets, the bake shop run by pastry chef Susan Molzan, offers
a spectacular array of Ellis’ ice cream. There are 24 flavors in a new display case; the tempting varieties look like an assortment of gelato.
But it’s richer than gelato. Much richer. Gelato, while incredibly creamy, contains about 4 to 9 percent butterfat (butterfat, the fatty part of milk, is a factor in ice cream texture). The Food and Drug Administration has defined ice cream as containing no less than 10 percent fat. Premium ice cream contains 12 to 14 percent and super-premium contains 14 percent and higher. (Dairy Queen, by comparison, is 5 percent butterfat.)
Lee’s Creamery ice cream falls in the superpremium category, at 15 percent butterfat. Another factor in texture is air. The more air churned into the product, the softer and fluffier the ice cream. Less air results in a denser ice cream. Ellis says his is practically airless.
Arguably the ice cream’s biggest selling point, however, is its provenance. Lee’s Creamery uses milk from grass-fed Jersey cows from Gramen Farms in Tomball and cage-free eggs from CNL Ranch in Angleton. Organic ingredients are used whenever possible, including local fruits such as peaches, strawberries and blueberries, when in season. The ice cream is made locally in a commissary. Petite Sweets stocks 24 in its dipping case on any given day, with up to 70 flavors in rotation — a catalog of unpredictable flavors that Ellis has dreamed up and personally supervised, flavor-wise.
Ellis’ interest in ice cream is almost fanatical. He’s devoted years of research and development to the project. He’s traveled the country to sample America’s most vaunted independent ice cream makers. And he talks to customers, practically on a daily basis, to get their opinions on ice cream.
It just also happens to be his favorite food. “I’ve been wanting to do this for many years,” he said while sampling flavors at Petite Sweets. “I felt there was a need for a very high-end product here in Houston.”
Ellis’ next goal is to create small-footprint storefronts for Lee’s Creamery shops that will offer his ice cream and Molzan’s cookies (their collaborative ice cream sandwiches, made with oversize cookies at Petite Sweets, are monster novelties). He’s currently scouting locations.
For now, though, Petite Sweets is ground zero for Houston’s newest brand of ice cream. The store offers flavors such as strawberry cheesecake, Mexican chocolate, sweet cream corn, bourbon bacon marmalade, Nutella rocky road, Saint Arnold’s root beer, carrot cake with cream cheese icing, coconut with corn flakes, lemon-blueberry, matcha pistachio, birthday cake, avocado lime and peaches and cream. Petite Sweets is making all the cookie/crust/ crumb add-ins that result in flavors such as Key lime pie (with graham cracker crust); chocolate super fudge brownie; and carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Ellis even touts a “breakfast ice cream”: a brown-butter ice cream laced with chunks of house-made angel biscuits and swirled with local honey.
That Ellis has created his own boutique ice cream business is hardly surprising. The restaurateur has had a long history of brand building. Houston diners know him from his former partnership with F.E.E.D TX restaurant group (the growing Liberty Kitchen restaurants), and now with an entirely new set of partners invested in Cherry Pie, another ambitious hospitality group.
Yet of all the projects he’s birthed, Lee’s Creamery is the one he’s most proud of.
“It’s a project that’s really personal to me. I love everything we do, but ice cream is really what I’ve wanted to do for so long,” he said. “I love ice cream. It’s my end all. I could bathe in it.”
greg.morago@chron.com twitter.com/gregmorago