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FROM COW TO CONE Homemade ice cream sweetens Frederick County’s summer BY GINA GALLUCCI-WHITE
South Mountain Creamery owner Tony Brusco finds inspiration for ice cream flavors in many different places. He could see a phrase in a book that gets his imagination going, or visit a new town and be inspired by a dish he eats there to create a new flavor. Last summer, inspiration came thanks to a number of regular ingredients being on backorder. And as a result, Brusco created one of South Mountain Creamery’s best-selling flavors, Snallygaster. “We were running short on ice cream so I basically went into our ingredient refrigerator and pulled a bunch of different ingredients together,” he said. He used peanut butter ice cream, added chocolate-covered pretzels and peanut butter cups then swirled in some caramel. The flavor was named for the 18th-century mystical creature believed to inhabit the creamery’s hometown of Middletown. It quickly became one of the shop’s best sellers. “Some flavors are created that way,” Brusco notes. “Some are more crafted when we are trying to achieve a certain flavor profile that is new and different. Sometimes people will come to me and they want to make a custom flavor. It just really depends.” The creamery has about 40 to 50 flavors in its portfolio, including “C is for Cookie,” a blend of cookie dough and cookies-and-cream ice creams, and Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake, for which they use locally grown blueberries. Peanut Butter Pie is another original flavor. Brusco anticipates adding three more options during the summer months of this year.
The ice cream process begins on the Middletown farm, where more than 500 cows are milked daily 50 yards from their processing plant. Every flavor starts with an ice cream base using a blend of milk,
“There are a lot of things you can play with to try to get the ice cream to what you want, to the taste and the texture you are going for,” he says.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LANIE SWANHART OF SOUTH MOUNTAIN CREAMERY
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“It’s my fun at the creamery where I get to be very creative and come up with new flavors,” he says. “I believe you can see that in the flavors we create.”
cream and sugar. The recipe took Brusco seven years to perfect, based on customer feedback, taste tests, playing with the amounts of butter fat and sugar content, and working with Pennsylvania State University professors in blending recipes.
