EATING IN
Life is
sweet
(and savoury)
Tatamagouche Ice Creamery offers flavours beyond traditional BY LORI McKAY
W
hen Daniel Curren thinks of ice cream, he sees a blank canvas, imagining potential flavours far beyond the traditional chocolate, vanilla and strawberry of his youth. Want to try a scoop of Ocean Playground Sea Salted Caramel? Or perhaps a Bourbon Coffee ice cream? What about something spicy, savoury or even beer flavoured? “Your imagination is the limit on what we can do,” says Curren, owner of the Tatamagouche Ice Creamery.
The Nova Scotia business first opened in the summer of 2020, in the heart of the pandemic. Having worked in investments for 20 years in Toronto and Halifax, Curren was ready for a change. He says moving to Tatamagouche and opening an ice cream shop was obviously a big change, but not as “out of the blue” as it sounds. It was something he had been thinking about for a very long time. “When I graduated high school, I was a little bit torn as to whether I should go to
PHOTO: STEVE SMITH / VISIONFIRE STUDIOS
Daniel Curren and his team at the scoop shop in Tatamagouche.
SUMMER 2022
culinary school or business school,” he recalls. “Obviously, I went to university, but I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to have some sort of food business.” Curren often cooked for family and friends and loved hosting dinner parties. His favourite items to serve always tended to lean toward more savoury cooking and baking. Ten years ago, he started to get into modernist cuisine, AKA “molecular gastronomy.” “I liked looking at the science of cooking,” said Curren. “One of the things I ended up doing was buying a jug of liquid nitrogen to play around with and I made a batch of ice cream at home. It turned out great. I made sort of an unusual flavour and it opened my eyes to see that ice cream is really interesting.” He got better and better at it and even auditioned for MasterChef Canada, making it to the regional finals. Curren grew up in Cole Harbour, N.S., but spent his summers at their family cottage in Malagash, near Tatamagouche. “Tatamagouche was always just a really cool, unique place,” says Curren. “A lot of rural Nova Scotian towns have a tough time keeping
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