One question we get time and time again at the creamery is, “Where do you come up with your flavors?” Honestly, there’s not really one clean, concise answer. We quite literally get recipe inspiration everywhere. Whether it be a favorite drink, an unforgettable meal, a funky whim, a bad date, or um…merely by accident, bits and pieces of everyday narrative find their way into each creamy concoction. In this case, a delicious childhood memory lends plenty of flavor to our Sour Cream and Banana Bread Ice Cream.
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Please, please, save your gasps, but the Leone children grew up on very few loaves of banana bread…we had something even better. Instead, sour cream banana cake was one of Mama Leone’s standby rotational desserts. How is this different from banana bread, you might ask? Uh, well, we’re not sure. All we know is that it DID mean it was baked in a sheet pan and almost certainly covered in cream cheese frosting. The perfect nighttime treat, the perfect after-school snack-- it was simple, delicious, and the ultimate accompaniment to Schwan’s vanilla ice cream. It was also another way our mother could sneak a bit of fruit into one of our brothers, Tony’s, diet. Growing up, bananas were one of two fruits he would eat (the other being ketchup). Needless to say, if there was banana cake in the house, it never went to waste.
To churn up a concoction deserving of its namesake, we went to the drawing board. While it would be a somewhat simple ice cream, there were layers of subtle flavors we knew we wanted to nail. A rich, satisfying sweet cream/sour cream base was a must. We also wanted a less fluffy, slightly denser (more banana bread-y, if you will) cake to sink your teeth into. By adding a couple additional egg yolks to the cake batter, we found it did just the trick! Fast forward to production day: with a little whisking here, a little tossing there, and lots of churning magic, we were rewarded with some sweet tastes of our childhood.