Some people choose a wine and cheese pairing for dessert while others choose ice cream. But founder of New York City’s boozy ice cream brand Tipsy Scoop, Melissa Tavss, believes that all 3 belonged together this holiday season. (Possibly making her Santa Claus for the booze, cheese, and ice cream-inclined.) Partnering with iconic New York cheese shop Murray’s Cheese, Tavss is introducing 3 wine and cheese ice cream flavors for the holidays, available through mid-January at all New York Murray’s and Tipsy Scoop locations, as well as online for nationwide delivery through Goldbelly: Brie & Bubbles, Chardonnay & Goat Cheese, and Blue Cheese & Port.
“I’ve always wanted to do a wine and cheese series, since a lot of our ice cream flavors are inspired by classic food and drink pairings,” says Tavss, “and I think the decadence and indulgence around wine and cheese pairings really lends itself nicely to an ice cream that’s really representative of that holiday celebration feel.”
Putting the Tipsy in Ice Cream
Tipsy Scoop was born in 2014 after Tavss had been tinkering with her own ice cream base recipe. “The consistency just wasn’t coming out in that creamy ice cream consistency that we all know and love,” she says. “So I started adding just a tablespoon of booze. A lot of recipes call for that to soften the texture so that it doesn’t come out too icy.”
What started as a practical step in ice cream consistency turned into a passion for Tavss. “One of my first experiments was vanilla bean bourbon, and the actual taste of the bourbon was coming through in the ice cream,” she says. “And that’s what I fell in love with. Unlike baking with alcohol, there was still alcohol content at the end of the process.”
Tipsy Scoop and Murray’s Collaboration
After years of marrying all manner of booze with ice cream — a straightforward process of adding booze to the ice cream base — infusing cheese into ice cream turned out to be an altogether different matter. “Infusing cheese into ice cream was not as easy as we might have thought, considering they’re both made of milk and cream,” says Tavss, and required a lot of experimentation in the ice cream making process in order to get to a product that tasted equally of the cheese and wine, and also had a creamy, desirable ice cream consistency. “We had a malbec and cheddar flavor that we ended up scratching,” she says. “We really just couldn’t get the consistency.”
Three classic wine and cheese flavors were hits, however, checking all the boxes for both flavor and consistency, available for your holiday entertaining needs.
Brie & Bubbles
“Brie is so buttery and creamy anyway, so the challenge at the beginning was that it was really hard to get any of the brie flavor in the ice cream,” says Tavss. “We ended up using more of the rind to really get the cheese flavor we wanted.”
Murray’s French Double Crème Brie is passed through cheesecloth, and then blended with an immersion blender in order to create a kind of cheese puree that becomes part of the base ice cream. Capitalizing on another classic Champagne pairing, Brie & Bubbles has a strawberry element to it as well, in the form of a roasted strawberry puree that gets swirled into the brie ice cream base. “It just added another layer to that flavor, tying the sweetness of the Champagne with the buttery, creamy brie,” says Tavss.
Chardonnay & Goat Cheese
Fresh goat cheese is no stranger to ice cream, and probably the easiest one to incorporate because of its rindless, creamy texture. “Goat cheese is interesting because that ice cream is actually one part goat cheese to one part ice cream mix,” says Tavss. “To pick up on that mild, tangy goat cheese flavor just required using a lot of it.” Massachusetts-based Westfield Farm Capri is the lucky chevre that lends its volume to the Chardonnay & Goat Cheese flavor.
Originally aiming for a classic Sancerre and chevre pairing, chardonnay ended up standing in for sauvignon blanc to make this ice cream a success. “With the sauvignon blanc you really couldn’t pick up on any of the wine,” says Tavss, its acidity matching the tang of the goat cheese too much to be able to distinguish wine from cheese in the blend. “The flavor just popped a bit more with chardonnay.”
Blue Cheese & Port
Perhaps the most classic holiday pairing, “this was a homerun from the beginning,” says Tavss, which also incorporates pear into the mix. “Even in my opinion, which was crazy because I hate blue cheese,” she says, tapping into the wisdom that blue cheese sometimes needs a sweet partner — ice cream, who knew? — to make it palatable to the uninitiated. (Please try this approach with the blue cheese-haters in your life and report back.)
With its naturally fudgy texture, Murray’s Stilton almost acts as candy bits within the ice cream base. “This is actually the only flavor that’s made with actual crumbles of cheese, like how we would with other candy mix-ins,” says Tavss.
Intrigued? Get your cheese and ice cream fix while you can. Tipsy Scoop will meet the demand for these 3 flavors through the holidays, at least until mid-January. And if you’re already hooked, “We like to do something different every holiday season,” says Tavss. “But we definitely would love to work with cheese again in some way. It’s just a really interesting, and a little bit more of an unexpected mix-in.”