Ice cream thrills and chills
CUTTING DOWN ON THE SUGAR MAKES THE FLAVOURS POP Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. This week she’s lapping up luxury.
Even a forbidden ice cream passes my lips, as well as an unreleased one. Cape Town has a wonderful, naturally-made ice cream range and Joburg has three. No wonder people stay here for the hot holidays now. It can’t all be about the traffic.
Heather and I vow to try all Pete’s Super Natural ice creams in one sitting, unaware that there are 10, not counting three extras. This Joburg ice cream dream includes doing the laps at Linden’s Farm Table, a true-foods shop.
If you’re called Peta Frysh aren’t you just inclined to be an ice cream maker? No. Peta is a journalist and sub-editor from the days of Aggrey Klaaste and a video producer. Her love of research and experimenting with pure, natural ingredients led her to producing the perfect homemade ice creams.
As do the best chefs, Peta builds into her ice creams details of flavour and texture. A lemon frozen yoghurt outside the ice cream range includes grated lemon rind with the natural juice, full-cream Greek locally-farmed yoghurt and whole blueberries. Her Vietnamese Coffee ice cream features a famous organic coffee as well as natural chicory for clever flavour depth, making it the best coffee ice cream I’ve eaten.
We giggle about ice cream as slow food but an example is the time taken popping organic corn, torching marshmallows made by a local specialist, homemaking the ‘honeycomb’ dessert and gradually churning them with hormone-free farm cream into Pete’s popcorn-flavoured ice cream. For the unreleased Amaretto Almond Brittle she makes the luxurious brittle first. None of the ice creams are unnecessarily sweet so their real flavours are apparent.
An elegant woman in a slim black sheath is attracted to the silence in which we lick with eyes closed and asks for a recommendation. I suggest Rose Pomegranate Turkish Delight. “I’m a Cypriot so we never say ‘Turkish’. It’s ‘loukoumi’.” Her beautiful eyebrows lift as she tastes and her eyes glaze. “Oh!”
The forbidden ice cream turns out to be my ultimate favourite. It’s exclusively made for Emma Chen so I’ll have to go to her PRON restaurant for a fix of Black Sesame Bliss with its notes of natural citrus. A notoriously bad shopper generally, I happily buy exceptional foods. We stagger from the Farm Table with armfuls of bags, I trying to get into the wrong car in front of its surprised right owner.
Pete’s Super Natural Ice Creams – 083-429-7969.